This is in fact the formula of our Magick; we insist that all acts must be equal; that existence asserts the right to exist; that unless evil is a mere term expressing some relation of haphazard hostility between forces equally self-justified, the universe is as inexplicable and impossible as uncompensated action; that the orgies of Bacchus and Pan are no less sacramental than the Masses of Jesus; that the scars of syphilis are sacred and worthy of honour as much as the wounds of the martyrs of Mary.
..the existence of “Evil” is fatal to philosophy so long as it is supposed to be independent of conditions; and to accustom the mind to “make no difference”[1] between any two ideas as such is to emancipate it from the thralldom of terror.
The Magician should devise for himself a definite technique for destroying “evil”. The essence of such practice will consist in training the mind and body to confront things which cause fear, pain, disgust, shame and the like. He must learn to endure them, then to become indifferent to them, then to analyse them until they give pleasure and instruction, and finally to appreciate them for their own sake, as aspects of Truth.
Aleister Crowley, Liber V vel Reguli (Ritual of the Mark of the Beast) [2]
I will just say it.
The global accounting, banking, and ‘money’ systems, are Satanic.
All three systems are based on and operate according to fundamental principles that are identical to those in the philosophy and practice of satanism.
They are also identical to those in the “system of thought” that George Orwell described as doublethink.
An honest observer should be able to see this clearly, with a little thoughtful reflection.
According to a former priest in the (Anton LaVey) Church of Satan, the four main tenets of satanic ideology are:
Self-Preservation
Moral Relativism
Social Darwinism
Eugenics
These principles can be discerned in just one passage from the most notorious and influential Black Magician of the twentieth century:
We have nothing with the outcast and the unfit:
let them die in their misery. For they feel not. Compassion is the vice of kings: stamp down the
wretched and the weak: this is the law of the
strong: this is our law and the joy of the world.
Think not, o king, upon that lie: That Thou
Must Die: verily thou shalt not die, but live.[3]
This is emphasised by the Fraternitas Saturni (Brotherhood of Saturn) in an oxymoronic, ‘blackwhite’ expansion on Crowley’s dictum “Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”:
Love is the Law, Compassionless Love.[4]
‘Art’ work allegedly owned by John Podesta. Note colours: ‘white’ demon (with Male, red-haired child) on Left; ‘black’ demon (with Female, white-haired child) on Right.
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, nihilist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche equated pity with self-annihilation.[5] For the satanist, or Black Magician, rejection of pity is “the magical equivalent of the rejection of self-annihilation.”[6]
In other words, to “emancipate” or “liberate” oneself entirely from the “bond” of compassion, of empathy for other beings, is seen as an act of Self-Preservation.
In our time compassion is even forbidden by science, as is already happening in England, where they have political economy.
‘Modern’ accounting, banking, and ‘money’ – the foundations of global finance, markets, economic and political life – all operate on the Double Entry Bookkeeping system.
Many historians and economists, including (eg) Werner Sombart, Max Weber, and Joseph Schumpeter, have traced the development of modern capitalist business practice to the Double Entry system, attributing to it the “pitiless” spirit of modern commerce in its “unending, systematic pursuit of profit”:
In [Schumpeter’s] view, double entry’s “cost-profit calculus” drives capitalist enterprise – and then spreads throughout the whole culture: “And thus defined and quantified for the economic sector, this type of logic or attitude or method then starts upon its conqueror’s career subjugating – rationalizing – man’s tools and philosophies, his medical practice, his picture of the cosmos, his outlook on life, everything in fact including his concepts of beauty and justice and his spiritual ambitions.” For Schumpeter, capitalism “generates a formal spirit of critique where the good, the true and the beautiful no longer are honoured; only the useful remains – and that is determined solely by the critical spirit of the accountant’s cost-benefit calculation”.[7]
Karl Marx – the 19th century arch materialist – stated that accounting is even “more necessary” for a communist system:
As unity within its circuits, as value in motion, whether in the sphere of production or in either phase of the sphere of circulation, capital exists ideally only in the form of money of account, primarily in the mind of the producer of commodities, the capitalist producer of commodities.
Bookkeeping, as the control and ideal synthesis of the process, becomes the more necessary the more the process assumes a social scale and loses its purely individual character. It is therefore more necessary in capitalist production than in the scattered production of handicraft and peasant economy, more necessary in collective production than in capitalist production.[8]
As we have seen in previous essays (here, here), Double Entry Bookkeeping was not created as a neutral, objective tool for value-adding producers or manufacturers to manage their costs. It was developed by merchants (traders) from the dawn of mercantile capitalism, as a tool whose real “use” value was to conceal their illegal practice of usury from Church-State authorities. It also served as a psychological tool of self-deception, enabling the merchant to convince himself that his actions were morally (thus ‘divinely’) justified – as “proved” by his meticulously-recorded and balanced books.
Merchants or traders have been condemned by true sages and religious divines throughout history and across many cultures, because their actions were seen as parasitic, and immoral; not adding to the common wealth of society, but merely taking from that produced by others.[9] The merchant is an intermediary, a middleman between producer and consumer, who aims to “buy low and sell high”, whether by fair means or foul (hello storytelling: advertising, marketing, “Public Relations”). He profits in whole or in part through taking advantage of what many today euphemistically call “information asymmetry” – which in other, more honest words, means the relative (to oneself) ignorance of others.
Double Entry embodies the satanic doctrine of Self-Preservation. The goal of the Black Magician is to become ‘as god’ – the Absolute, the One, the All, the Nothing, the ‘Divine Mind’ or ‘Pure’ Intellect – without sacrificing* his or her “individuated existence”.
(*The exact opposite of the Christian doctrine of self-sacrifice, and its ultimate aspiration of self-less union with, or complete self-annihilation in, the Divine; e.g., Matthew 16:20-25.)
Double Entry is a numeric and sophistic tool of control over the real or imagined events of the past, present, and future. It offers the possibility of becoming ‘as god’; of attaining Ultimate Power over the material realm (“Money Power”), which the magician equates with power over the imaginary (‘divine’ mind) realm as well.
This serpent, SATAN, is not the enemy of MAN, but HE who made Gods of our race, knowing Good and Evil; He bade ‘Know Thyself!’ and taught initiation. He is ‘the Devil’ of the Book of Thoth and His emblem is BAPHOMET, the androgyne who is the hieroglyph of arcane perfection.[10]
According to Lewis Mumford (Myth of the Machine), accounting’s “concentration on abstract pecuniary rewards” – Profit (or Loss) – “introduced a driving motive into daily life, equivalent on its own base level to the monk’s search for an eternal reward in Heaven. The pursuit of money became a passion and an obsession: the end to which all other ends were means.”
Double Entry Bookkeeping also embodies the satanic doctrine of Moral Relativism.
The core of Crowley’s magical philosophy is the willed dissolution of opposites – “Let there be no difference … between any one thing and any other thing.” – in greater unity (agape, love).[11]
[As we have seen, ‘love’ in satanic doctrine is “Compassionless”, “pitiless”.]
Every single transaction recorded by Double Entry, is entered twice. The one action or event (real or imaginary) is dissolved or divided into two records which, in effect, cancel out or an-nihil-ate each other: a debit entry, and an equal and opposite credit entry.
Debits must equal Credits.
Negatives must equal Positives.
‘Evil’ must equal ‘Good’.
Black must equal White.
The union of both – the “sacred marriage” or “union of opposites” – equals Nothing:
I am God, I very God of very God; I go upon my way to work my Will; I have made Matter and Motion for my mirror; I have decreed for my delight that Nothingness should figure itself as twain… [two]
I am the None, for all that I am is the imperfect image of the perfect; each partial phantom must perish in the clasp of its counterpart, each form fulfil itself by finding its equated opposite, and satisfying its need to be the Absolute by the attainment of annihilation.
The World LAShTAL includes all this.
LA—Naught.
AL—Two.
LA … represents the Ecstasy of Nuit and Hadit conjoined, lost in love, and making themselves Naught thereby. [..]
AL, on the contrary, though it is essentially identical with LA, shows “The Fool” manifested through the Equilibrium of Contraries. The weight is still nothing, but it is expressed as it were two equal weights in opposite scales. The indicator still points to zero.
[“ShT” is “Fire” (Sh) and “Force” (T); it “expresses the secret nature which operates the Magick or the transmutations.” Abbreviation of “Shaitan”; Satan.][12]
The Fool, Thoth Tarot deck, Aleister Crowley’s Book of Thoth, Liber LXXVIII. (Source: bibliotecapleyades.net)
The Double Entry system embodies what George Orwell referred to in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four as “the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink [..] a vast system of mental cheating”:
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.[13]
The key word here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary.[14]
The Double Entry system also embodies another “essential” principle of Satanism, and applies it in the same way, for the same purpose: as its means to an end – the practice of Antinomianism.
The [left-hand path] practice .. often manifests itself in antinomianism, that is, the purposeful reversal of conventional normatives: ‘evil’ becomes ‘good,’ ‘impure’ becomes ‘pure,’ ‘darkness’ becomes ‘light’.
In [Crowley’s] “theology” the results of the application of this antinomianism are that opposites, such as the Beast and the Lamb (Rev. 13:8) and the Whore of Babylon and the Woman clothed with the Sun (Rev. 12:1) are only apparent, and that from a higher perspective they are unities or equivalencies (Beast = Lamb; Whore = Woman).
LaVey sees as natural [the] indulgence in all the so-called seven deadly sins of Christianity: greed, pride, envy, anger, gluttony, lust and sloth. Each of which he views as a possible catalyst for positive and natural human activities or attitudes … (See the Satanic Bible, ch. III). The fact that most people today, and the whole “western industrialized economy” is really driven by the desires of the masses to indulge in all of the seven deadly sins is a powerful argument for the presence of a Satanic Age.[15]
The capitalist scheme of values in fact transformed five of the seven deadly sins of Christianity – pride, envy, greed, avarice, and lust – into positive social virtues, treating them as necessary incentives to all economic enterprise; while the cardinal virtues, beginning with love and humility, were rejected as ‘bad for business,’ except in the degree that they made the working class more docile and more amenable to cold-blooded exploitation.[16]
Double Entry causes much confusion (“Babel”, from Hebrew בָּלַלbalal, Babylon), not only with beginners (‘novice’, ‘apprentice’) but even with experienced practitioners (‘adept’). The reason why is because its ‘logic’ is the exact opposite of what a normal person would naturally expect, based on the words used.
In common understanding, the word “credit” implies something Good. A positive. Something that adds to, increases, or improves. “Well done! That work is a credit to you.”
A “debit”, on the other hand (see etymology), is commonly understood to mean the exact opposite; something Bad. A negative. A loss, deficiency, or deficit. “On the biographical debit side there are the usual miscellaneous acts of thoughtlessness, rudeness and generally shabby behaviour.”
In Double Entry, however, the operating ‘logic’ is reversed. In its fundamental process – recording entries – words actually mean the exact opposite of what we normally understand them to mean.
A “debit” does not subtract (-) from an account. It adds to it (+).
A “credit” does not add (+) to an account. It subtracts from it (-).
(That is, for an Asset account. For a Liability account, the same words mean the reverse: a “debit” subtracts, and a “credit” adds. Doublethink.)
The satanic principle and practice of antinomianism – the deliberate inversion or reversal of values and conventions; the breaking of rules, laws, taboos – is embedded in Double Entry’s basic operation.
It is pitiful to see, how strangely some Men of Quality and Fortune, are to seek in Accompts; and how they are blinded and bambouzled by the Mists, that artful Men raise up before their Eyes, with Estimates, as they call ’em, and Representations of Values, drawn out of immense Books of Accompts, while the proper Judges know the Way neither into, nor out of them, and listen to the Jargon, as if it were Coptick, or Arabick.
Roger North, The Gentleman Accomptant, 1714
“For every debit there must be a credit, and for every credit there must be a debit” – Alas! How few consider that if this must be the case, the rule to go by, nothing is more easy than to make a set of books wear the appearance of correctness, which at the same time is full of errors, or of false entries, made on purpose to deceive!
Edward Thomas Jones, Jones’ English System of Book-Keeping by Single or Double Entry, 1796
The whole difference, and the only difference, between the two systems of accounting is in the fact that single-entry bookkeeping always uses literal language, while double-entry bookkeeping always uses figurative language except when speaking of persons.
In single-entry bookkeeping, cash means cash. Merchandise means merchandise. Interest means interest. Expense means expense. But in double-entry bookkeeping cash does not mean cash; it means the imaginary person who owes the amount of the cash. Merchandise does not mean merchandise; it means the imaginary person who owes the amount of the merchandise. Interest does not mean interest; it means the imaginary person who owes or is owed the amount of the interest. Expense does not mean expense; it means the imaginary person who owes the amount of the expenses. Net Capital does not mean net capital; it means the person (real in the case of an individual owner, imaginary in the case of a firm or a corporation) who is owed or owes the amount of the net capital.
Charles M. Van Cleve, Principles of Double Entry Bookkeeping, 1913
A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.
Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.
Consider closely “The Fool” (‘0’) tarot card (shown above), as designed by Aleister Crowley. His exposition of its symbolism can be found here.
At some point in future, I hope to discover the necessary motivation to begin the task of elaborating on the colour green and its far-reaching symbolic significance, not only as the “colour of money”, but also in alchemy, Cabala, sex ‘magick’, human biology, chemistry, metallurgy, and in Hollywood movie ‘entertainment’.
UPDATE 8 June 2018: included clarification (in parentheses) regarding the opposite application of debits and credits for Asset and Liability accounts.
**********************
REFERENCES
[1] In the ‘Jewish’ festival of Purim, conventional normatives (such as social roles, e.g., teacher and student, adult and child) are reversed, and revellers are encouraged to drink until “he cannot tell the difference between ‘blessed be Mordechai’ [‘Good’] and ‘cursed be Haman’ [‘Evil’]. See Jeffrey Rubenstein, Purim, Liminality and Communitas, Association for Jewish Studies Review, Vol. 17, No. 2, 1992
[2] Aleister Crowley, Liber V vel Reguli (Ritual of the Mark of the Beast); retrieved 5 June 2018
[3] Aleister Crowley, Book of the Law, or Liber AL II: 21; retrieved 5 June 2018
[4] Gregor A. Gregorius, G. Mitleidlose Liebe (cited in Flowers, Lords of the Left-hand Path, 1997, p. 148)
[5] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (cited in Flowers, Lords of the Left-hand Path, 1997, p. 149, fn 68)
[6] Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-hand Path: A History of Spiritual Dissent (1997), p.149
[7] Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Shaped Modern Finance (Kindle edition, p. 169)
[11] Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-hand Path: A History of Spiritual Dissent (1997), p.144
[12] Aleister Crowley, Liber V vel Reguli (Ritual of the Mark of the Beast); retrieved 5 June 2018
[13] George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (2003 Centennial edition), Plume Harcourt Brace, USA. p. 220
[14] ibid., p. 218
[15] Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-hand Path: A History of Spiritual Dissent (1997), p. 144, 185 – “‘Satan represents all of the so-called sins, as they all lead to physical, mental, or emotional gratification!’ is [..] a specific exhortation to indulge in those things which collective or mass culture may call sins – because by virtue of their very rejection by the mass they can be exalted as worthy aspirations for the individualistic Satanist.” (p. 186)
[16] Lewis Mumford, Myth of the Machine (1967)
[17] Joel H. Amernic and Russell J, Craig, Accounting as a Facilitator of Extreme Narcissism (2010), Journal of Business Ethics 96(1):79-93.
It’s not good for women to go through the procedure and have something living sucked out of your bodies. It belittles women… Every time a woman has an abortion, it just crushes her self-esteem, smaller and smaller and smaller.
This essay was prompted by an exchange on Twitter. An account named @LiveAction tweeted a paraphrase of the above quote, to which I responded with an excerpt from the Apocalypse of Peter (c. 2nd Century AD):
For those with eyes to see, the blue highlighted sentence revealed what was in my heart. The motive and intent.
Empathy.
A compassionate desire to give something, some small amount of consolation, of encouragement, of hope, to the heart of a stranger who, presumably, feels sufficient inner pain concerning the topic to have committed some part of their own life – Time, and labour energy – to public activism.
Perhaps little more would have resulted from this gesture, if not for a third party reply. An attempt at alchemical transformation; of extracting a more ‘pure’ essence from the base material – a ‘higher’, more ‘en-light-ened’ form of ‘knowledge’ – by the “royal Art” of philosophistry:
My interlocutor attempted to justify the killing of the unborn, based on the ‘logical’ reason-ing that a belief in the idea of the baby going to heaven “would arguably outweigh any bad thing about abortion”.
In doing so, he willfully ignored the majority of the quoted excerpt, detailing the punishments to be suffered by both women and men who cause their children to “be born untimely”; who “delivered us unto death”.
This perfectly manifests what is the reigning spirit – and mental-ity – of our times.
True Lords of the Left-Hand Path will .. identify with the cultural norms of ‘evil’ [..] The practice .. often manifests itself in antinomianism, that is, the purposefulreversal of conventional normatives: ‘evil’ becomes ‘good,’ ‘impure’ becomes ‘pure,’ ‘darkness’ becomes ‘light’. [Flowers, 1997]
Where have we heard that sort of inversion-of-values philosophistry before? In my previousessays, where I have explained the ancient origins of the ontological sex magick principles of Eastern and Western alchemy, that are deeply embedded in the ‘modern’ (neo-Babylonian) double entry accounting, banking, and credebtpromise-based ‘money’ systems:
[The third] justification for the “transgressions” of the Vajrayana consists in the Bodhisattva vow of Mahayana Buddhism, which requires that one aid and assist every creature until it attains enlightenment. Amazingly, this pious purpose can render holy the most evil means. “If”, we can read in one of the tantras, “for the good of all living beings or on account of the Buddha’s teaching one should slay living beings, one is untouched by sin. … If for the good of living beings or from attachment for the Buddha’s interest, one seizes the wealth of others, one is not touched by sin”, and so forth. In the course of Tibetan history the Bodhisattva vow has [..] legitimated numerous political and family-based murders, whereby the additional “clever” argument was also employed, that one had “freed” the murder victim from the world of appearances (samsara) and that he or she thus owed a debt of thanks to the murderer. [Trimondi, 2003].
The same perverse form of messianic, “heal the world” (tikkun olam) by practicing evil, utopian philosophistry, appears in myriad writings of philosopher ‘luminaries’ from the Hermetic Reformation (“Renaissance”, Fr. “rebirth”) and the En-Light-enment, through to modernity’s John Maynard Keynes:
I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue. [..] But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight. [Keynes, 1930]
Satanism is self-Deification; specifically, the deification of the supposedly ‘rational’ individual’s “Divine Mind” – the “Absolute Intellect”, or “Absolute Reason” – associated with the left hemisphere of brain activity.
The Left-hand path ideology identifies with the “eternal rebel” (and trickster) known variously through the ages as (among other names) Prometheus, Hermes, Mercury, Satan, and Lucifer.
The “Light-bringer”. Intermediary agent of the gnosis: the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The archetype of “absolute freedom” from all social, moral, and legal taboos; “unfettered” from all restrictions to the attainment of “ultimate sovereignty” in (or rather, over) the material realm.
On the path of jnana (knowledge) the practitioner is himself transformed into a being of the divine typos without sacrificing his individuated existence… [Flowers, 1997]
The eight “fetters” (does that number ring any bells?) that restrict the “liberty” of the witting (or unwitting) satanist – that hold him/her back from becoming a ‘god’ – are, in the Hindu left-hand path tradition of vamachara, “Sympathy. Delusion. Shame; the idea of sin. Fear. Disgust. Family, kinship, clan. Caste. Customary rites and precepts. As each of these bonds or fetters are broken the [initiate] becomes progressively more liberated.” (Flowers, 1997)
The phase of Blackening which usually marked the beginning of the work, was brought about either by heating the prima materia in the process of Calcination (the ‘dry way’ of the alchemists), or by the process of Putrefaction, a slow rotting or digestion over a period of weeks or months (the so-called ‘wet way’). The Black Crow or Raven was often associated with this Calcination, for on vigorous heating the calcined material would usually carbonise and layers would flake off and move like a crow’s wings in the flask. The Toad was a better symbol of the Putrefaction, the decaying mass slowly pulsating and shifting as gasses were given off, while the substance rotted down to a black mass. [..] The alchemists paralleled these experiences in their souls as a withdrawal into the darkness of their interior space, a darkness pregnant with possibility. [McLean]
The coat of arms traditionally attributed to Satan in European heraldry. In the book The Heraldic Imagination by Rodney Dennys (1975), this is traced back to the late 13th-century Douce Apocalypse manuscript, in an illustration to Revelations 20:7-10. The design is based on the “three unclean spirits like frogs” of verse 16:13. Green frogs on a red background contravenethe heraldic Rule of Tincture – presumably deliberately.
Removing these “fetters” necessarily means eliminating all feelings of compassion, empathy (“sympathy”), and most importantly, guilt (“shame”).
In other words, in order to become fully “free”, one’s own “ultimate sovereign”, and thus “divine”, one must become lawless (“Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”), and a psychopath:
He may have to participate in exercises of cruelty and other aberrations of social and religious norms as a way of placing himself totally outside of profane society. Thereby he is ‘unfettered’ from the bonds and tabus of society as a way of unfettering himself from spiritual bonds. [Flowers, 1997]
Satanism – or Left-hand Path ‘magic’ – seeks “liberty” from “the servitude of conscience.“
In essence, the Left-hand Path is an egocentric philosophistry of separation or “non-union”, that prescribes the willful deception, manipulation, domination, theft, and ultimately, the destruction of one’s Right side – the faculty of emotion, empathy, holistic thinking; the intuitive, compassionate, nurturing Female principle – the Mother Nature felt in us all – in order to attain apotheosis as an individual, Intellectual ‘god’:
[A] symbolic murder is hidden behind this. The black matter, a symbol of the fundamental feminine and of powerful nature from which we all come, is burned or in some cases vaporized, cut to pieces or dismembered. Thus, in destroying the prima materia we at the same time destroy our “mother” or, basically, the “fundamentally feminine”.
The European adept does not shy away from even the most crass killing metaphors: “open the lap of your mother”, it says in a French text from the 18th century, “with a steel blade, burrow into her entrails and press forward to her womb, there you will find our pure substance (the elixir)”. [Trimondi, 2003]
[T]he essence of the vamachara [Sanskrit: “left-handed attainment”] is the total transformation of the human initiate into something superhuman or god(dess)-like. This lies at the root of why antinomianism (inversions of all kinds of normatives) is so important in the methodology of … the left-hand path.
An eternal separation of the individual intelligence from the objective universe is sought in the left-hand path. This amounts to an immortality [divinity] of the independent consciousness… .
[O]n the leftward way one does not worship a god but rather one enacts divinity from a subjective perspective. [Flowers, 1997]
“For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof,
then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods,
knowing good and evil.”
In the Genesis story, the archetype of Woman (Eve) was doomed to suffer “greatly multipl[ied]” pain and suffering in pregnancy and childbirth, in consequence of disobedience to God’s (cosmic, natural) law, and the resulting Fall from innocence: a pure, ‘god’-like state of being, of not knowing both good and evil.
This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.
The symbolism of the pear – having the form, or silhouette, of a woman with “child-bearing hips” – has important relevance in religious and alchemical lore.
The pear tree represents the Tree of Life. It is mentioned in literature and folklore connected with love and temptation. An aludel is a pear-shaped earthenware bottle, open at both ends, used as a condenser in the sublimation process, and so came to signify the end-stages of transformation. It is also called the Hermetic Vase, the Philosopher’s Egg, and the Vase of the Philosophy.
In Greek and Roman mythology, pears are sacred to three goddesses: Hera (Juno to the Romans), Aphrodite (Venus to the Romans), and Pomona, an Italian goddess of gardens and harvests. The ancient Chinese believed that the pear was a symbol of immortality. (Pear trees live for a long time.)
During medieval times, however, (if you will excuse the dreadful pun) the symbolism went pear shaped, and the pear, as a whole tree and fruit, then symbolised masculinity, which would seem extremely strange until one realises that the symbolism applied largely to the tree and not the fruit. According to Albertus Magnus, writing in the 13th century and accepting the ancient and orthodox view of his time, the pear is considered masculine because of “the hardness of its wood, the coarseness of its leaves and the close texture of its fruit.”
Sephardic Jews – in other words Jews who followed the Kabbalah and were thus part of the mystic groups, used a pear tree as their emblem.
The great Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) reveled in collecting cryptic puns, aphorisms, fables, prophecies, jests, mottoes, and fantastic tales. Codex Arundel 67 contains several botanical fables including one involving the laurel, the myrtle, and the pear:
The laurel and the myrtle on seeing the pear tree being cut down, cried out in a loud voice: ‘O pear tree where are you going? Where is the pride that you had when you were laden with ripe fruit? Now you will no longer make shade for us with your thick foliage.’ The pear tree replied: ‘I am going with the husbandman who is cutting me down and who will take me to the workshop of a good sculptor, who by his art will cause me to assume the form of the god Jove, and I shall be dedicated in a temple and worshipped by men in place of Jove. While you are obliged to remain always maimed and stripped of your branches [while] men shall set around me in order to do me honor.” (Embode, 1987).
Earlier in the Genesis story, the Creator is portrayed commanding Adam and Eve to “Be fruitful and multiply” (1:28). In Judaism, this commandment (mitzvah) – the First Commandment, to the First Man and Woman – is called peru u’rvu (Hebrew: פרו ורבו).
Rabbinic lore, however, overrides this First Commandment, with an exemption:
Jewish law traditionally exempts women from the obligation of peru urvu [..] This is because pregnancy endangers her life, and one is not obligated to endanger oneself. Such an exemption strengthens the woman’s right to protect her health over that of a fetus that endangers her. [Grossman, 2006]
Rabbinic lore is replete with mutually contradictory exemptions – loopholes – devised by the Sages.
For example, the Sages teach that Leviticus 18:5 (“You shall keep My statutes and My Judgments, which a person shall do, and he shall live by them”) really means that “the mitzvot were given to provide life, but they were not given so that one will die due to their observance.” (Sanhedrin 74a)
Based on this interpretation, the Sages derived the precept that “protecting life” overrides all other commandments (Tosefta Shabbat 15:17).
(Example: the subjective, arbitrarily applied – according to self-interest – “Responsibility To Protect” [R2P] euphemism as justification for U.S. “interventionist” foreign policy.)
However, while pregnant women are not obligated to endanger their own lives for the sake of an unborn child, the rabbinic Sages also insist that one is obligated to endanger oneself rather than violate the commandments against murder (?!?), sexual violence (incest, rape, adultery), and idolatry:
The Gemara now considers which prohibitions are permitted in times of mortal danger. [..] With regard to all other transgressions in the Torah, if a person is told: Transgress this prohibition and you will not be killed, he may transgress that prohibition and not be killed, because the preserving of his own life overrides all of the Torah’s prohibitions. This is the halakha (rabbinic law) concerning all prohibitions except for those of idol worship, forbidden sexual relations, and bloodshed. Concerning those prohibitions, one must allow himself to be killed rather than transgress them. [Sanhedrin 74a]
In other words, according to the ‘wisdom’ of the ‘Sages’, on the one hand, a married or betrothed woman must choose to be killed, rather than submit to rape:
[S]o too, with regard to a betrothed young woman, if she is faced with rape, she must be killed and not trangress the prohibition of forbidden sexual relations. [Sanhedrin 74a]
But, on the other hand, if she is pregnant, then she may commit murder of the unborn, if the reason given is that doing so will preserve her own life and “health”.
Notably, in Satanic lore, the first main tenet (principle, or doctrine), is Self-Preservation. The second tenet, is Moral Relativism.
True black magic is performed with the aid of a demoniacal spirit, who serves the sorcerer for the length of his earthly life, with the understanding that after death the magician shall become the servant of his own demon. For this reason a black magician will go to inconceivable ends to prolong his physical life, since there is nothing for him beyond the grave. [Hall, 1928]
Contrast the first principle teaching of Jesus of Nazareth: “This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
Both the Torah and rabbinic lore have much to say concerning the binary notions of Life and Death.
We have seen in earlier essays that Jewish mystical philosophy (Cabala) openly confesses its origins in “Old Chaldean” ontology – a worldview, or philosophy of being and reality, in which every thing in the universe is believed to be created from the sexual union (merging, mixing, fusing, binding, blurring) of exact opposites.
This is illustrated in the Cabalistic ‘Tree of Life’ or ‘Gates of Light’, where the ’emanations’ or attributes of God and Being are depicted as gendered pairs, joined together in a sequence of mystic, ‘sexual’, father-mother-son-daughter unions of opposites.
We have also seen that the ‘trick’ of alchemical sex magick, is the cunning inversion or reversal of the natural “flow” of the (pro)creative fluids, which are considered “energies” – the semen virile and semen feminile.
To reverse the left to right pattern, contrary to nature and cosmic law requires an exercise of the faculty of will. This is an act of rebellion against nature and against divinely ordained cosmic order.
Practitioners .. may often rely on what appears to non-initiates to be chicanery and tricks involving slight of hand.
What is important here is the left-hand path technique or philosophical model of inverting or reversing natural processes through the power of will and consciousness. By being able to reverse natural ‘flow patterns’, be they in the body (subjective) or in the world (objective), practitioners of the left-hand path demonstrate or exercise their independence from the natural universe – thus establishing that which is divine in their individualities. [Flowers, 1997]
In left-hand path sexual alchemy, rather than the male fertilising the female – which would mean giving his vital “energies” to her – he steals the female’s “flows” by a secretly-practiced sexual exercise, or (for the less skilled) by drinking them.
“After he has streamed forth,” Mircea Eliade quotes a text as saying, “he draws in and says: through my force, through my seed I take your seed — and she is without seed”. The man thus steals the seed of the woman under the impression that he can through this become a powerful androgynous being, and leaves her without her own life energy. [Trimondi, 2003]
The Mercurial Rebis: A Crowned and Bat-winged Hermaphrodite, Buch der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit, late 14th Century (Munich MS, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, CGM. 598). Source: Adam McLean, alchemywebsite.com
This secret Tantric practice is tacitly affirmed in Lurianic Cabala:
[Isaac Luria’s disciple, Chaim] Vital describes how the face-to-face status of the Father and Mother [sefirot] visages was maintained by ‘feminine waters’ (mayim nukvim) emanating from the interior of the Mother. [Drob, 2003]
Naturally – or rather, un-naturally, since antinomianism (inversion or reversal of normatives) is fundamental to satanic practice – it is believed that the greatest power is obtained from internalising those things that have been traditionally considered impure, unclean, and thus off-limits or taboo.
The magical principle of transforming or ‘purifying’ any substance or experience to serve the purpose of the pure Will of the magician is typical at all levels of the left-hand path.
When discussing antinomian left-handed tantrism Renou states “… we observe the inversion of normal worship and common ethical principles. The fact that those objects are ‘worshiped’ is evidence that the stage has been passed at which they would be considered sinful.” So objects or practices which would normally inspire shame, hate or fear in the orthodox .. will be willfully worshipped and engaged in with a sublimated attitude of sacrality.
It is by breaking these taboos [incl. cannibalism and necrophilia] and going beyond the barriers of good and evil that the [initiate] attains new levels of power and ‘liberation’ (from his human limitations).
It is this third category, the libertines, which [Marquis] de Sade saw as the apex of humanity. Libertines, through active use of the imagination, transform themselves through acts of will… . For de Sade the greatest pleasures were to be found in overcoming things which may have at one time inspired fear or disgust. [Flowers, 1997]
This explains why left-hand path philosophers and practitioners throughout the ages and across many cultures have evidenced a peculiar obsession with the cyclical monthly “flows” of the female.
[E]very woman knows that she has two kinds of flow that come from her vagina. Ancient sources called these the River of Life and the River of Death, meaning the clear or white flow at the time when a child is more likely to be conceived; and the forbidden flow of menstruation, when it is most unlikely that a child can be conceived. [Lishtar, 2000]
Trimondi, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic, and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism (2003).
In the Hevajra Tantra the adept must drink the menstrual blood of his mudra out of a skull bowl. [..] As a tantric saying puts it, “What binds the fool, liberates the wise”, and another, more drastic passage emphasizes that, “the same deed for which a normal mortal would burn for a hundred million eons, through this same act an initiated yogi attains enlightenment”. According to this, every ritual is designed to catapult the initiand into a state beyond good and evil.
According to the tantric logic of inversion, that precisely the worst is the most appropriate starting substance for the best, the yogi need not fear the magical destructive force of the menses, as he can reverse it into its creative opposite through the proper method. [Trimondi, 2003]
“Bufo” (toad) “rubea” (red, reddish; feminine of rubeus)
at ‘base’ (‘Mother’ earth, prima materia) of Tree of Life
“Saturnus Plumbum” (Satan’s ♄ lead; transformation into ‘gold’)
This may also offer a deeper insight into, and explanation for, the Western Establishment’s “liberal” support for abortion … and the sale of body parts.
“Modern philosophies and political ideologies have fully embraced principles basic and fundamental to the left-hand path, almost all of which have become the accepted norm in the west.”
“It’s not good for women to go through the procedure and have something living sucked out of your bodies. It belittles women… Every time a woman has an abortion, it just crushes her self-esteem, smaller and smaller and smaller.”
– Dolores O’Riordan, The Cranberries
*****************
REFERENCES
Stephen E. Flowers PhD, Lords of the Left-hand Path: A History of Spiritual Dissent (1997)
V. and V. Trimondi, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism (2003), transl. by Mark Penny
John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Essays In Persuasion, The Future (1930)
Adam McLean, Animal Symbolism in the Alchemical Tradition (alchemywebsite.com)
Mark Passio, Natural Law: The Real Law of Attraction (2013)
Rabbi Susan Grossman, Mikveh and the Sanctity of Being Created Human (2006)
Sanhedrin 74a, The William Davidson Talmud, (sefaria.org)
Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928)
Sanford L Drob, Towards a Kabbalistic Psychology: C.G. Jung and the Jewish Foundations of Alchemy (2003)
Lishtar, The Avenging Maiden and the Predator Gardener: A Study of Inanna and Shukaletuda (2000), citing Shuttle and Redgrove (1989)
The magic chain of speech was typified among the ancients by chains of gold, which issued from the mouth of Hermes. Nothing equals the electricity of eloquence.
To make the Magic Chain is to establish a magnetic current which becomes stronger in proportion to the extent of the chain.
The Great Work in Practical Magic .. is the formation of the magnetic chain, and this secret is truly that of priesthood and of royalty. To form the magnetic chain is to originate a current of ideas which produces faith and draws a large number of wills in a given circle of active manifestation. A well-formed chain is like a whirlpool which sucks down and absorbs all.
– Éliphas Lévi, Dogme et Ritual de la Haute Magie, (1855)
But whose lives, exactly, are the “our” lives that you marched for?
To find the answer, let us examine the hidden forces behind this well-organised, well-funded social movement, one that is purported to be “created by, inspired by, and led by students.”
Democratic strategists probably view the public uproar over the Las Vegas massacre and the continued persistence of school shootings as a gift from heaven or hell.
No, it is not simply the Democrats. Their involvement, and that of the liberal celebrity set, is hardly hidden – it is plain for all to see.
Depending on one’s philosophical leaning, these forces are either “miraculous” (Jewish), or “magical” (left-hand path, ‘Black Magic’).
The “miraculous” is associated with beliefs derived from the Babylonian Talmud, and commemorated since the Middle Ages as The Great Sabbath – a celebration of the mythical “War of the Egyptian Firstborn” against their own government.
Last Shabbat was Shabbat haGadol, the Great Shabbat, the last one before Pesach. It was also the occasion for another ritual, that national gathering called the March for Our Lives.
The “magical” is associated with Cabalist theurgical beliefs derived from ancient Babylonian astrology, numerology, alchemy, and the conjuration of “spirits” (angels and demons).
How well stated it was, how timely. This week, for the Sabbath before Passover, Shabbat HaGadol, the Great Sabbath .. Could the connection be any better?
As we will see, March For Our Lives also has much in common with the ‘Black Magic’ ritual methodology used by the Nazi Third Reich, “to focus attention on the cause and shape and nature of the cause.”
The importance of ritual and spectacle, public and private, is obvious to anyone who has seen films of Nazi rallies, parades, and so on. The National Socialists were modern masters of symbolism and ritual – what would be called Lesser (Black) Magic in left-hand path circles today. (Nowadays only rock concerts and sporting events remain as pathetic attempts at this kind of spectacle.)
As individuals can be transformed by rituals, whole cultures can also be metamorphicized through collective participation in such rituals. Even marginally effective ones, if repeated often and long enough, will have some result. But it may take only one good jolt from a highly potent rite to have a profound and lasting effect. The Nazis used both kinds.[1]
Please note that our purpose here is not to comment on the pros versus cons of the gun control debate – whether in the U.S.A., or elsewhere. Our exclusive focus is on examining the occult ‘magic’ ritual devices that have been employed to influence public opinion.
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.[2]
To whet the readers appetite for this necessarily lengthy exposition, here following are the subject areas covered. Clicking on each title links to its respective segment. It is recommended however, that they be read in order. A brief summary is included here, for the impatient or time-pressed reader interested only in the bare minimum, sans historic illustrations, photos and other evidences, and explanations. Please consider the words of George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four as you continue:
Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest of arguments if they are inimicable to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.[3]
Shabbat HaGadol – War of the Egyptian Firstborn Talmudic legend: Egyptian firstborn took up arms against their own government, hoping to compel Pharoah to grant freedom to the Hebrews, and thus save themselves from Moses’ 10th plague, the Angel of Death. Jews cannot lie on Sabbath; the firstborns’ intervention, driven by self-interest, saved them from need to lie. Seen as “miraculous” transformation of evil into good for the Jews.
The “Tactical” Sefirot – Hod (8) – Means to an End Claim of 800,000 Washington attendance, 800+ global rallies debunked. Significance of number 8 in Cabalist ‘magic’ and mysticism. Feet as “means to an end,” hidden motive exact opposite of one presented. Hod (8) = left foot, evil side, retribution. Alchemical symbolism: left foot forward. Left-hand Path, occult magic, Tarot divination in context of 8, the Four Eights, Tetragrammaton, mirror reversal, and March For Our Lives logo.
‘Magic’ – Time-ing is Everything Time-dependency: key to success in invocation and command of angelic/demonic powers in medieval Cabalist texts. Brief overview of Cabalist ‘magic’ influences on Renaissance through Enlightenment to post-modern humanist philosophy. Western Establishment culture “spawned from intersections of modernist rationalism and occultist magic and mysticism.”
The Babylonian Sun Seal – Magic Square 111/666 Magical significance of David Hogg speech timing, and social media user names. Babylonian priests’ Magic Square, Sigillum Solis gold amulets. 111/666 connection. Washington rally stage symbolism, and the Rule of 72. The alchemists’ 🜓. “Dragon’s blood.” The Star of Raiphan / Chiun / Saturn / Satan and Shabbat (Sabbath) SaturDay. Lunar cycle: March 24 Half Moon, left side in darkness. Talmudic legend: Ashmedai / Asmodeus the “king of demons,” ruler of “good” Jewish demons, compelled through ‘magic’ to help build Solomon’s Temple, using his feet. Child sacrifice. Nachiel – the “intelligence of the sun”; angel controlling the sun: Hebrew letter gimel, “person in motion.” The Four Princes of the Evil of the World. Conjuration of the Four spirits of darkness.
Hollywood Hamsa – Evil Eye amulet for Sabbath Pussyhat creator’s “Evil Eye Glove” promotion. History of Jewish hamsa (Evil Eye-in-palm of hand) talisman. The “Hand of Miriam” connection to timing of Great Sabbath celebration. Talmudic law allows carrying an “approved amulet” on the Sabbath, rabbinic exception to biblical prohibitions against magic, divination, and working on Shabbat.
Nazi ‘Black Magic’ – Weaponisation of Youth Ritual devices and methodologies. “Ceremonies of the Reich and the Course of the Year” liturgical calendar, replacement for orthodox Christianity. Springtime (late March) “commitment to the cause.” The Pledging of the Youth – David Hogg’s speech mirrors Hitler-Jugend / Bund deutscher Mädel rite of passage formula. Nazi “Holy Nights”, and leaving a chair for Elijah. The Chariot card. ‘Lesser’ Black Magic.
Hear the Chabad-Lubavitch organisation recount the tale:
The Talmud relates what happened when 600,000 Jewish heads of household began rounding up their lambs on the 10th of Nissan. The lamb was worshipped as a deity in ancient Egypt, so this caused quite a commotion. The firstborn of Egypt, who held the key social and religious positions in Egyptian society, confronted the Jews, and were told: “We are preparing an offering to G‑d. In four days, at the stroke of midnight, G‑d will pass through Egypt in order to execute the tenth and final plague; all firstborn will die, and the people of Israel nation will be freed.”
The firstborn, having already witnessed the first nine plagues occur exactly as Moses had warned, approached Pharaoh and his generals and demanded that the Jews be freed immediately. When Pharaoh refused, the firstborn took up arms against Pharaoh’s troops, killing many of them.
This “great miracle” is commemorated each year on the Shabbat before Passover, which is therefore called Shabbat HaGadol, “The Great Shabbat.”
Why do we commemorate the miracle on the Shabbat before Passover rather than on the tenth of Nissan, the date on which it actually took place? We see that the Torah itself mentions only the date rather than the day of the week.
It is because the miracle is closely connected to Shabbat. The Egyptians were aware that the Children of Israel observed Shabbat and did not busy themselves tending animals on that day, so when the Egyptians saw them taking lambs and binding them to their bedposts on Shabbat, they were surprised and decided to investigate what was happening.
The Children of Israel were in great danger when they were confronted and were saved only by virtue of a miracle. We therefore commemorate this miracle on Shabbat rather than on the tenth of the month of Nissan.
Moreover, had it not been Shabbat, the Children of Israel would not have needed a miracle to save them. They would have been able to deceive the Egyptians by diverting their attention or making up some kind of explanation. On Shabbat, however, they would not do so, for, as our Sages said, “Even an ignorant man will not tell lies on Shabbat.” Thus, we see that they were endangered because of their observance of Shabbat, and they needed a miracle to save them.
A further reason why we recall the miracle on Shabbat rather than on the tenth of the month is that, forty years later, Miriam [Moses’ sister] died on that day and the well which accompanied the Children of Israel and provided them with water in the wilderness, disappeared.[4]
The implication that it would be quite acceptable to lie and deceive – to break the 9th Commandment – on days other than the Sabbath, bears highlighting.
As does the first two tenets of satanic ideology: Self-Preservation, and Moral Relativism.[5]
For Hasidic and other esoterically-inclined Jews steeped in ‘magical’ interpretations of the Torah, the Babylonian Talmud, and cabalist texts such as the Sefer Yetzirah (ספר יצירה), Sefer Razi’el HaMalakh (ספר רזיאל המלאך) and the Zohar, this legend has long held another, “higher” significance. It symbolises the “miraculous” transformation of evil into good:
But is this simple victory of good over evil the final goal of Jewish teaching? Chassidic thought presents a higher ideal: transformation of evil into good, of darkness into light. On the national level, the enemy becomes a friend; on the inner personal level, the Evil Desire is transformed to good, and now works energetically in service of G‑d. [..]
This Shabbat before Passover, called the Great Shabbat (Shabbat HaGadol) also expresses the idea of transformation of bad to good.
The ancient Egyptians had enslaved and tortured the Jews. When Moses came with the Divine mission to bring the Jews to freedom, working one miracle after another, Pharaoh continued to resist. Yet on the Shabbat before the Exodus, commemorated by this Shabbat today, the Egyptian firstborn began to side with Moses, actively attacking their own government.
The Sages tell us that the attack was a response to the idea that the final plague, which had been forecast by Moses, would mean death for the firstborn. We might see it as no more than a reaction to personal fear. However, the Lubavitcher Rebbe points out that it was more than that. It was a transformation of the inner spiritual nature of existence. Ancient Egypt represented the depths of evil, implacably opposed to holiness, as indeed we see in the figure of Pharaoh himself. Yet on that Shabbat, what the Sages term a “great miracle” took place. Within Egypt itself, in fact the firstborn of Egypt – meaning the future leaders – began a movement on behalf of the Jewish people.
True, Pharaoh and the Egyptian authorities were not transformed at that point, and the tenth plague and then the Splitting of the Sea, destroying the Egyptian forces, had to follow. But the rebellion of the firstborn was a taste of the transformations of the future, when all darkness will be changed to light, and all violent evil to good.[6]
The “Tactical” Sefirot – Hod (8) – Means to an End
According to the website of March For Our Lives, Inc., the Washington DC rally was mirrored by “800+ sibling marches across the globe”. NBC and many others reported the event organisers’ claim that “800,000 people attended the march” and that, globally, “there were approximately 800 marches organized on Friday and Saturday — even one in Antarctica.”
This was sharply contradicted by CBS News, who reported the findings of Digital Design & Imaging Service Inc (DDIS), a Virginia-based firm which uses a proprietary method for calculating crowd size using aerial photos. According to DDIS, the peak crowd size was 202,796 people – one quarter (1/4) of the organisers’ claim – and the crowd reached its largest size at 1 pm.
Why tell such a bold lie? Is there perchance (or per design) a ‘magical’ significance to the number 8? If so, is that significance in some way relevant to this particular event?
Why yes. Let us count the ways.
In Cabalist doctrine, the eighth sephira (emanation) of “G-d” is the left “foot” of Adam Kadmon (Primordial Man), and is named “Hod” (הוד). Its opposite in the Cabalistic “Tree of Life” or “Gates of Light” is the seventh emanation (right “foot”), named “Netzach” (נצח).
The Jewish Encyclopedia (1906) informs us that “the conception underlying the cabalistic tree, of the right side being the source of light and purity, and the left the source of darkness and impurity” traces back “ultimately to old Chaldea.”[7]
Netzach and Hod: Means to an End Just like a loving parent may seem cruel when harshly disciplining a child in order to instill good values, the “tactical” sefirot of netzach [“victory”] and hod [“awe”] are often not what they seem.
When we call these sefirot “tactical,” we mean that their purpose is not inherent in themselves, but rather as a means for something else.
For example … I may use the tactic of kindness, though my intent may be antagonistic. I could lure an enemy into a trap by inviting him with a smile and a pleasant demeanor. The exterior façade of the act is pleasantness, its interior is punitive.
Netzach refers to actions of God that are chesed, “kindness,” in essence, but are presented through a prelude of harshness. Hod refers specifically to those events where the “wicked prosper.” It is retribution — gevurah, “strength/restraint,” in essence, but presented by a prelude of pleasantness.[8]
Gun control activism, presented with a pleasant façade, as a prelude to retribution?
Recall the praise of Jesus for the approaching Nathanael, who, on receiving news of him, had artlessly responded, “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?” — “Here is an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile nor deceit nor duplicity!”
All the sefirot are likened to different parts of a body, and netzach and hod are likened to the two feet of a person: right foot and left foot.
Why feet?
Feet are usually only the means for a person’s activity. The hands are the main instrument of action and the feet are simply a vehicle to bring the person to the place in which he wishes to execute that action.
Secondly, the distinction between right and left foot is nowhere as pronounced as the distinction between the left and right hands. Similarly, while the distinction between chesed and gevurah is sharp, the distinction between netzach and hod is less sharp. Both are a mixture of chesed and gevurah and therefore the distinction is blurred.[8]
Revolution is “pleasant”, and pleasantness conceals retribution?
March For Our Lives, right left.
Readers of my previous essays on alchemy (“transformation”) may have noticed that in alchemical texts from both the East and West, the adept is typically illustrated in a left-foot-forward posture.
Vajra (“diamond scepter”) in the “Burning Circle”. (Source: Trimondi, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism)
In occult traditions, the 8th sefira hod is described as “a force that breaks down energy into different, distinguishable forms, and it is associated with intellectuality, learning and ritual.” This is the ideology and method of the Left-hand Path: deifying the individual “Divine Mind.” Hod is said to be the sphere in which the magician mostly works. According to 19th century French occult magus Éliphas Lévi, hod represents “Eternity of the conquests achieved by mind over matter, active over passive, life over death.”[9]
In Hermetic-Qabalah, hod’s polar opposite in the Qlippoth (קְלִיפּוֹת), the Dark Side of the “holy sefirot” representing evil or impure spiritual forces, is a demon “called by the Hebrews, Samaël; by other easterns, Satan; and by the Latins, Lucifer”[10], the “angel of Mars”[11] (male, active, war); “The Desolation of God, or The Left Hand,” and its planetary symbol is Mercury ☿ .[12] In his book 777, the “Wickedest Man in the World” Aleister Crowley associated hod with the FourEights of occult tarot, and with Anubis, Thoth, Hanuman, Loki, Hermes, Mercury, Jackal, Hermaphrodite, Opal, Storax, and quicksilver.[13]
Éliphas Lévi affirmed this divinatory association (“The fourEights. Four times he triumphs on the timeless plane”[14]), emphasising that “The Key to the Great Mysteries will be established on the number four — which is .. also the number of the square and of force”:[15]
Turning now to the four suits, namely, Clubs, Cups, Swords, and Circles or Pantacles, commonly called Deniers all these are hieroglyphics of the tetragram [יהוה]. Thus, the Club is the Egyptian Phallus or Hebrew jod; the Cup is the cteïs or primitive he; the Sword is the conjunction of both, or the lingam, represented in Hebrew preceding the captivity by vau; while the Circle or Pantacle, image of the world, is the he final of the divine name.[16]
Observe carefully the four black silhouettes in the March For Our Lives logo, positioned exactly under the “UR” (meaning original, prototypical, primal; name of Abraham’s native city). Note the subtle difference in their forms: male-female-male-female (Left to Right), mirroring the jod-he-vav-heיהוה (male-female-male-female) in the (Right to Left) Hebrew script.
The eighth Major Arcana card in a traditional Tarot deck is Justice, and the eleventh card is Strength. Note the (“blurred,” “tactical”) correspondences to Jewish Cabala’s hod and netzach. Many modern Tarot decks, especially in the English-speaking world, have switched the numbering of these two cards to make them better fit the astrological correspondences derived by the English freemasonic Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Éliphas Lévi tells us that the days of the moon possess a special character, corresponding to “the twenty-two Tarot keys.” The eighth day (Justice) is a “Day of expiation”, and signifies the “Murder of Abel” – the second-born (good) son of Adam and Eve – by Cain, the first-born (evil) son.[17]
Perhaps not coincidentally, in Jewish tradition the ‘magic’ covenant ritual of circumcision is performed on male children on the eighth day from birth.
VIII. La Justice (Justice) | An original card from the tarot deck of Jean Dodal of Lyon, a classic Tarot of Marseilles deck which dates from 1701-1715. (Source: Wikipedia)
VIII. Strength | Tarot card from the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, 1909. (Source: Wikipedia)
The eighth letter in the Hebrew alphabet (“Ḥet” or “Chet”, ח) represents the numerical value 8. Its shape traces back to a hieroglyph for “court-yard.”
Éliphas Lévi informs us that Ḥet ח represents “Balance, attraction and repulsion, life, terror, promise, and threat.”[18]
There is one more interesting observation:
In chat rooms, online forums, and social networking the letter Ḥet repeated (חחחחחחחחחח) denotes laughter, just as in english, in the saying ‘Haha’.
‘Magic’ – Time-ing is Everything
It requires only a superficial acquaintance with the contents of cabalist, occult and ‘magic’ texts, to recognise the great importance placed on the timing of magical practices, in order to maximise their effectiveness, and potency:
Inscribing the names of angels on sigils was also thought to be efficacious, a tradition begun in the thirteenth century by the increasing influence of Jewish cabalistic texts such as the Sefer Yezirah and the Sefer Razi’el. These works were used by Jewish astrologers who served as courtiers in medieval Spain, and were later incorporated in Pico della Mirandola’s cabalistic theses in 1486.
The texts claimed that the ‘secret names of the God and the angels provided the means by which the powers were called down into the sublunar levels of the cosmos’, and hence used an intricate and often bewildering angelology in ritualistic magic. The Sefer Razi’el at its beginning gives directions for invoking the angels ‘that change according to the month, day and hour, and for using them for a peculiar purpose, such as prophecy’ or protection. Because astrological influences were also thought to be time-dependent, it is not difficult to see how the two magical traditions of astrology and cabala merged in the casting of sigils.[19]
Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man, written in defence of his cabalistic 900 Theses, was a key text of Renaissance humanism. A paean to self-Deification and the Hitlerian “Triumph of the Will” (cf. Nietzsche’s der Wille zur Macht, “will to power”), Mirandola’s Oration has been called the “Manifesto of the Renaissance.” According to Left-hand Path adept and writer Stephen E. Flowers:
From the time of the Renaissance, the dawn of the Modern Age, there has been a steady development toward secularization, rationalism, and even materialism within the establishment of western culture. This has manifested in everything from the growth of free-trade capitalism, to representational democracy, to “secular humanism,” to Marxist political theory. But at the same time during the course of the most recent and accelerated phase of modernism (from about 1880 to the present) there has been a growing “occult revival” running below the surface of established norms. In this counter-cultural phenomenon the keys to the current manifestations of the left-hand path can be found. It will be found too that these keys help unlock many mysteries housed in the establishment culture, which were in many cases spawned from intersections of modernist rationalism and occultist magic and mysticism.[20]
Readers who may be interested to discover for themselves the airbrushed-from-history history of occult and magical philosophy, belief and practice, and its influence on ‘science’, politics and culture, from the Renaissance (known as the “Hermetic Reformation”) throughout the so-called Enlightenment and into the 20th Century, are encouraged to begin with the works of English historian Dame Frances Yates.
Flowers explains that:
In reality the true Devil, the exemplary model of the magician of the left-hand path, is fully liberated again from the theological dungeon of medievalism with the advent of Classicism [1700–1800]. The gate was opened during the Renaissance, and his chains were broken by the Enlightenment, but only with Classicism does he begin to walk the earth freely again.[21]
The Babylonian Sun Seal – Magic Square 111/666
The Washington DC March For Our Lives crowd size peaking at one o’clock meant maximum impact for several timely ‘coincidences’.
At 1:11 pm, the figurehead speaker David Hogg concluded his speech with the defiant raised fist salute, a symbolic gesture commonly associated with communism and other revolutionary movements since its use by the Industrial Workers of the World in 1917, the year of the Bolshevik Revolution.
His prepared speech was precisely 4 minutes long. We have already seen a little of the occult significance of the number 4.
The time of Hogg’s triumphant finale – 1:11 – also has a ‘magical’ significance.
Gematria is “an Assyro-Babylonian-Greek system of alphanumeric code or cipher, later adopted into Jewish culture, that assigns numerical value to a word, name, or phrase.” In the Mispar Shemi method, 111 is the value of alef / alephא, the first(born) letter of the Hebrew aleph-bet (1 + 30 + 80; obtained from its spelling, אלף).
111 has explicit ‘magical’ conjuration connections with 666, the Number of the Beast in St. John’s book of Revelation.
How so?
Babylonian priests wore gold amulets – Sigillum Solis – inscribed with the Magic Square of 36 (6×6) – photographs below. The sum of any row or column (including the two diagonals) in the Magic Square, is 111. The sum of all the numbers (1–36), is 666.
The March For Our Lives logo, with its four (4) words plus four (4) silhouettes, was displayed 9 times (3×3) behind the speaker at the Washington DC rally. There are two plausible interpretations: 9 x 4 = 36 = 6×6 Magic Square (also, 36 = 3+6 = 9, 3 3’s); or, 9 x 8 = 72 (and, 7+2 = 9, 3 3’s), the Cabalists’ “Seventy-two-Lettered Name” of Yhwh (יהוה), and the Rule (or “Power”) of 72.
David Hogg at Capitol Hill. ( 9 x 4 = 36 | 9 x 8 = 72 )
Also noteworthy is that the march was held from noon to 3 p.m. (12 (1+2=3) – 3; 33), on Pennsylvania Avenue between 3rd street and 12th street NW (3 – 12 (1+2=3); 33).
From 12–3 pm (33). On 3–12 St. (33).
The alchemists’ symbol for the synthesis of Mercury ☿ (Hermes) + Sulphur 🜍 (Satan) – Mercury(II) Sulphide, or Cinnabar – is 🜓.
I urge readers to ponder each detail in that sentence. Very carefully.
The art of extracting elemental mercury from natural cinnabar (HgS) appears to have been common practice by the end of the fourth century BC. The reverse process – artificial synthesis of cinnabar from mercury and sulphur – has been known since before 400 AD.[22]
Vermillion is a brilliant red or scarlet pigment made from powdered cinnabar. It was widely used for art, decoration, and cosmetics in ancient Rome, in illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages, and in Renaissance art. Differences in hue, from bright orange-red to a duller reddish-purple, are created by varying the fineness of the ground particles. It was highly valuable; in the Middle Ages, despite alchemists then having knowledge of artificial manufacture of cinnabar, vermillion pigment remained almost as expensive as gold leaf.
In the Roman triumphus, a civil ceremony and religious rite celebrating and sanctifying the success of military commanders in the service of the state – traditionally, through victory in foreign wars – the victors’ faces were painted with vermillion, as also the face of Jupiter (alchemical symbol ♃ ), supreme deity in the Roman pantheon, on Capitoline Hill.
The Triumphs of Caesar III: bearers of trophies and bullion, Royal Collection, Hampton Court Palace (Source: Andrea Mantegna, public domain)
Vermillion was used to paint the walls of some of the most luxurious villas in Pompeii, including the Villa of the Mysteries.[23] The principal source of cinnabar was the Almadén mine in Spain, worked by slaves; a death sentence, due to the highly toxic dust of mercury ores. According to Roman historian Pliny the Elder:
Nothing is more carefully guarded. It is forbidden to break up or refine the cinnabar on the spot. They send it to Rome in its natural condition, under seal, to the extent of some ten thousand pounds a year. The sales price is fixed by law to keep it from becoming impossibly expensive, and the price fixed is seventy sesterces a pound.[24]
In the Byzantine empire, cinnabar and the vermillion colour were reserved for the use of the Imperial family and administrators; official letters and imperial decrees were written in vermillion ink, made from cinnabar.[25]
Cinnabar in white calcite matrix. (Source: irocks.com)
The name “cinnabar” derives from ancient Greek κιννάβαρι (“kinnabari”), a foreign word, probably of Oriental origin (possibly the Persian “zanjifrah” in the same sense).[26]
The records of antiquity show that from ancient Rome through the Middle Ages, there was always great confusion in distinguishing between the highly expensive vermillion-coloured pigment derived from the toxic mineral cinnabar, and that derived from the resin of the Dracaena tree species. The Romans were most familiar with Dracaena cinnabari, the Socotra dragon tree or dragon’s blood tree, native to the Socotra archipelago – part of Yemen, in the Arabian Sea – an important trading centre on the Incense Road to ancient Europe since at least the time of the Ptolemies. It is mentioned in the 1st century Periplus (30: 10. 17) as one of the products of Socotra. “Dragon’s blood” was not only an alternate source of vermillion pigment but also a ‘magical’ cure-all medicine. It was used in medieval ritual magic and alchemy, and remains popular to the present day in a wide variety of occult circles.[27]
Note if you will the historic confusion of opposites, by virtue (or vice) of identical colour – deadly (and valuable) mineral cinnabar (Hermes-Satan), versus medicinal curative “dragon’s blood.”
Dracaena draco leaves showing dragon’s blood pigment at the base. (Source: Wikipedia)
Dragon’s blood (Daemomorops draco), powdered pigment or apothecary’s grade and roughly crushed incense. (Source: Wikipedia)
The ancients claimed that God works by mathematics. Their religion was a conglomeration of religion, astrology, alchemy, physical and mental science, and mathematics. Ancient astrology divided the starry heavens into 36 constellations. These were represented by different amulets called “Sigilla Solis,” or the sun seal. These amulets were worn by the pagan priests, and they contained all the numbers from 1 to 36. By these figures they claimed to be able to foretell future events. These amulets were usually made of gold, yellow being the sun color.
These [..] photographs taken in 1910, show actual amulets then in the Berlin Museum. They reveal the veneration the ancients had for the sun-god. On the front side of No.1 we see the god of the sun standing on the lion. This indicated the sun’s position in the constellation of Leo during the hot days of August. On the back is inscribed “Nachyel,” meaning “intelligence of the sun,” and in 36 squares are arranged the numerals 1 to 36 [..] in such a way that adding the numbers of any column either horizontally or vertically, and also the two diagonals crossing the square, the total is the same – 111. The sum of the six columns, computed either horizontally or vertically, is 6 x 111, or 666.
The second illustration is also a solar seal, but it honors the star Basilisco, which was the diminutive form of the Greek basileus (king), thus meaning the same as the Latin regulus. Now, Regulus is the only first-magnitude star in the constellation of Leo. The sun and the moon are again clearly seen on this amulet, and on the reverse side is the same arrangement of numerals, with the actual figure given of the total 666.[28]
Likewise the “magic sign or seal of King Solomon, known to the medieval Jew as the Magen Dawid [✡]”[29] is a representation of 666 (6 points, 6 triangles, 6 sides of inner hexagon). In antiquity it was the Star of Raiphan / Rephan / Remphanρεμφαν, from Hebrew Chiunכִּיּוּן or Kewan, probably derived from Old BabylonianKayawanu (name of the planet Saturn / Satan), whence the Roman god Saturnus’ (Greek “Kronos”, time) Day, our ‘modern’ Saturday, the 6th day of the week.
Saturn, from Chymica Vannus, Amsterdam, 1666. (Source: Adam McLean alchemywebsite.com)
Jewish observance of the Shabbat (Sabbath) day similarly derives from the Old Babylonian Shabbatum, 15th day of the month, day of the Full moon, and of its transformation from waxing to waning; a liminal time, considered unlucky as the evil god Kayawanu / Saturn was believed to scupper attempts to work on this day.[30]
(Source: universetoday.com)
The Great Sabbath, March 24, 2018 in Washington DC was a First Quarter moon, so named for when the moon has reached one quarter of its full orbit around Earth. It is often called a Half Moon, as we can see exactly half of the Moon’s surface illuminated. In the northern hemisphere, the left-hand side of the moon appeared in darkness on March 24.
The Jewish Virtual Library informs us that “[t]he Castilian kabbalists, Isaac b. Jacob ha-Kohen, Moses of Burgos, and Moses de Leon (in his Hebrew works and in the Zohar), linked the existence of demons with the last grade of the powers of the “left-side” emanation (the sitra ahra, “other side,” of the Zohar) which corresponds in its ten Sefirot of evil to the ten holy Sefirot“:
Doing things in pairs, especially drinking an even number of cups, invites the malevolent activities of demons; an exception is the four cups enjoined in the seder on Passover for which reason that occasion is called “a night of guarding” (Ex. 12:42), i.e., of protection from demons.[31]
Passover Craft For Kids: Four Cups Of Wine Paper Doll Chain. (Source: creativejewishmom.com)
In the Zohar it is thought that .. there are also good-natured devils who are prepared to help and do favors to men. This is supposed to be particularly true of those demons who are ruled by Ashmedai אַשְמְדּאָי (Asmodeus) who accept the Torah and are considered “Jewish demons.” Their existence is mentioned by the Hasidei Ashkenaz as well as in the Zohar.[31]
Asmodeus is said to be the king of the demons in Jewish lore. He is the demon of lust, responsible for twisting people’s sexual desires. According to the Testament of Solomon and Talmudic legend, King Solomon acquired the archangel Raphael’s secret knowledge of ‘magic’, by which he was able to place Asmodeus in chains and compel him to help in building Solomon’s Temple, making clay with his feet, and serving as a drawer of water (water boy). Solomon would not give him his liberty “because that fierce demon Asmodeus knew even the future”.[32]
Asmodee. From Jacques Albin Simon Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal, 1863 edition. (Image source: Wikipedia)
In the Bible, the 6-pointed Star of Chiun / Saturn ✡ – called the Double Triangle and/or Seal of Solomon in occult circles – is associated with child sacrifice to the Canaanite god Moloch / Melech מלך (Hebrew for “king” of the Jews). (Acts 7:43, cf. Amos 5:26).
Saturn devours one of his sons. Peter Paul Rubens, 1636. (Museo del Prado)
In cabalistic lore, “Nachyel” (also “Nachiel”) is the name of the ‘angel’ of Leo’s governing planet, the Sun. In Hebrew, Nachiel is represented as ג (Gimel, 3rd letter of the aleph-bet). In Gematria, gimel represents the number three. It is said to be written like a vavו (6) with a jodי (10) as a “foot” – by a vertical inversion of the jod, apparently. It is believed to resemble a person in motion. The word gimel is related to gemul (גְּמוּל), meaning ‘justified repayment’, or the giving of reward and punishment. Spelling out Nachiel’s name (NKYAL נכיאל) gives a numerical sequence 30 + 1 + 10 + 20 + 50 = 111, and multiplied x 6 = 666:
The geometric figure for the intelligence of the Sun is formed by joining the numerical values of the letters forming the name of the angel Nachiel on the Sun’s magic square, the tens and hundreds often expressed by ones if the number is not extant in the square. So, in the case of our magic square for number 6, table of the Sun, beginning with the first row, we connect 3 + 1 + 10 + 20 + 5…[33]
The magic square of the Sun, its planetary angel Nachiel, and figure of the angel. (Source: Ann Marie Roos, ‘Magic Coins’ and ‘Magic Squares’, Notes Rec. R. Soc. (2008) 62, 271–288)
In gold amulet No. 1 shown above, this figure of the ‘angel’ Nachiel, reversed 180 degrees horizontally, appears on the front side near the upper right edge (approximately 2 o’clock position).
Israel Regardie (né Regudy), Aleister Crowley’s personal secretary and transcriptionist, and fellow adept in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, explains further:
The method proposed by Abramelin for calling forth the Four Princes of the Evil of the World is by means of magical squares containing, in certain formations, various letters and names. These squares when charged and energized by the magical will set up a magnetic or electrical strain in the Astral Light to which certain beings consonant to that strain respond in the performance of acts ordered by the Magician.[34]
A century earlier, Éliphas Lévi affirmed:
Talismans are consecrated by the four exorcised elements, after conjuring the spirits of darkness by the Conjuration of the Four.[35]
Observant readers may find further remarkable coincidence in the knowledge that the pig is forbidden meat in Jewish law, and that the 4 minute speech of David Hogg included a simple, two syllable, cleverly oxymoronic (Grk ὀξύς–μωρός: “sharp-dull”) crowd energy-invoking chant of defiant rebellion – “No More!” – exactly 6 times.
George Orwell’s blackwhite, the key word illustrating the principle of doublethink – “a vast system of mental cheating” – springs analogously to mind.
Hollywood Hamsa – Evil Eye amulet for Sabbath
Hollywood screenwriter Krista Suh sought to reproduce the award-winning success of her Pussyhat Project™ – the symbol for the anti-Trump protest march on Inauguration Day, 2017 – with a new promotion for March For Our Lives: the Evil Eye Glove.
It came to me in a dream, just minutes before waking up – I had a dream of a protest, a huge peaceful crowd with their hands outstretched toward the sky – each palm had a huge EYE drawn on it.
Her promotion gained wide support from the mainstream media worldwide, and from prominent politicians such as Minority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi and the Mayor of DC, Muriel Bowser.
You’ve probably seen these uniquely shaped symbols on pendants worn by Jewish women or displayed in Judaica stores. And in Israel the hamsa — whether on necklaces, keychains or displayed on walls — is as ubiquitous as the Star of David.
But what is a hamsa exactly? And what makes it Jewish?
This symbol of an eye embedded in the palm of an open hand has had numerous other names throughout the ages, including the eye of Fatima, the hand of Fatima, and the hand of Miriam. The form is sometimes rendered naturally and other times symmetrically with a second thumb replacing the little finger.
The hamsa has been variously interpreted by scholars as a Jewish, Christian, or Islamic amulet, and as a pagan fertility symbol. Yet even as the magical form remains shrouded in mystery and scholars debate nearly every aspect of its emergence, it is recognized today as a kabbalistic amulet and as an important symbol in Jewish art.
As the references to Fatima (Mohammed’s daughter) and to Miriam (Moses’ sister) suggest, the amulet carries significance to both Jews and Muslims. One of the most prominent early appearances of the hamsa is the image of a large open hand that appears on the Puerta Judiciaria (Gate of Judgment) of the Alhambra, a 14th-century Islamic fortress in southern Spain.
It would not be unusual for an Islamic symbol to find its way into Sephardic Jewish culture, which flourished alongside Islam. However, amulets are somewhat problematic in Judaism because the Bible prohibits magic and divination. Still, the Talmud refers on several occasions to amulets, or kamiyot, which might come from the Hebrew meaning “to bind.” One law allows for carrying an approved amulet on the Sabbath, which suggests that amulets were common amongst Jews at some points in history.[36] (Shabbat 53a, 61a)
In an article for The Jewish Magazine titled “Angels and Demons,” Norman A. Rubin explains that “the use of magical powers was seen as normal during the Talmudic era“:
In the ancient and medieval worlds, Jews were reputed to possess much knowledge about magic: amulets and spells to heal from sickness or harm one’s enemies, mystical incantations to ascend to heaven or bring angels down to earth, and information about the beneficent angels who assisted humans in their fight against the demons of illness and madness. Jewish magic has been part of folk Jewish knowledge and elite rabbinic practice through the years. [..]
Written testimony to the magic formulae in Jewish literature can be found in the Bible, the Mishnah, the Talmud, and the Midrashim – and in archeological finds, i.e. in Qumran a fragment of a scroll was found containing magic compositions that was written in the Hasmonaean era.
Indeed, in Judaic tradition the hamsa is believed to be referenced in Deuteronomy 5:15, stated in the Ten Commandments as the “strong hand” of God who led the Jews out of Egypt.
Some hamsa artifacts have the colors red and blue, both of which are said to thwart the Evil Eye. The symbol of the hand, and often of priestly hands, appears in kabbalistic manuscripts and amulets, doubling as the letter ‘SHIN’ [שׁ], the first letter of the divine name ‘Shaddai’ (one of the names referring to God).
These hands are divided into twenty-eight sections, each containing a Hebrew letter. Twenty-eight, in Hebrew numbers, spells the word Koach = Strength. | Shefa Tal, Hanau, 1612. (Source: Jewish Virtual Library, Witnesses to History: For Students of Kabbalah)
Evil Eye Red String Kabbalah Bracelet with silver Hamsa. (Source: kabbalah-red-bracelets.com, Tel Aviv)
There is much more to the history of the Evil Eye, the concept having appeared in many cultures since antiquity. Wikipedia’s entry offers an extensive overview.
Nazi ‘Black Magic’ – Weaponisation of Youth
Let us conclude our examination of the occult and ‘magical’ methods utilised by March For Our Lives Inc., with a comparative overview of ‘Black Magic’ ritual in the Third Reich.
In Lords of the Left-hand Path, Stephen E. Flowers debunks numerous examples of war-time and post-war propaganda, arguing that “the whole ‘Occult Nazi Mythos’ is bogus in character, and misses the whole point of any real Black Magical, or left-hand path aspects that might have been occurring in the National Socialist movement”:[37]
The magical methodology of the National Socialists, as we can construct it today, extended from private chambers to mass rallies, from traditional folk-festivals to high-tech electronics, from the rites of war to the rites of spring. As with all magic, however, the aim must be kept firmly in focus when attempting to understand it. In this instance the aim was the forging of the Master Race – the Volk made divine.
The most massive problem was cultural in nature – how to motivate millions of the most modern, well-educated people in the world to cooperate in the most radical social and magical experiment in history? The attempt to manipulate the mass-mind to these ends was the underlying factor in much of that which we can readily identify today as real “Nazi occultism.”
The ritual devices were often complex and manifold, but they generally consisted of these elements: ritually shaped space, motion within that space, color, sound (music), and the spoken word. All this was played out in a pattern of dynamic tension between the individual and the gathered mass – nowhere is this more symbolically clear than the sight of the Führer addressing the faithful troops at Nuremberg.[38]
The methods described here must be interpreted as “magical” because they are intended to cause changes in conformity with will and they are making use of theories that exceed, or stand outside of, the established science of their day or ours.[39]
According to Flowers’ research it “was clear from the beginning of the Third Reich that the Party was actively trying to displace orthodox Christianity.” To that end, the Nazis instituted their own “sacred calendar,” named the “Ceremonies of the Reich and the Course of the Year.” One example can be seen in how the German Christmas festivities “became the targets of Nazi liturgical reinterpretation”:
Himmler was especially interested in re-Germanicizing the festival as the Yule-Fest. Goebbels and Rosenberg both used more subtle means. In all cases, however, since this festival always had been (even in pagan times) a private family or clanic and not a public affair, it did not become a candidate for massive Nazi liturgy. It posed a new problem: how to develop National Socialist traditions in private homes. It was 1942 before this began to take on set forms.. .
During the Christmas seasons of 1943 and 1944 the Ministry of Propaganda issued a book called Deutsche Kriegs-weihnachten (A German War-time Christmas) which… went so far as to present the legend of the dead soldier who returned for “Holy Nights” to participate invisibly in celebrations with the family.”[40]
This ritual bears a curious and remarkable correspondence to the Jewish Passover ritual of opening the door and leaving an honorary empty chair for Elijah – the biblical prophet believed to have been taken to heaven alive, and expected to return as forerunner of the Messiah-ben-David:
Chariot of Fire, March for Our Lives
This is one of those texts on which Messianic hopes are built. The prophet promises that God will send Elyahu haNavi, Elijah the Prophet to herald the day and to “turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents” ([Malachi] 3:24), to bring reconciliation at long last.
Who is this prophet Elijah? He is the one for whom we will open our doors on Seder night after beginning the ritual with a call for whomever is hungry to come and eat. Our Tanakh teaches that the prophet entered paradise while alive, that “he went up in a stormwind, Elyahu, to heaven,” (2 Kings:2:11) on a “chariot of fire.” Therefore, Elyahu is understood by our Rabbis and Sages to be a kind of emissary between worlds*. In the Talmud he shows up in the heavenly yeshiva and in gatherings on earth.[41]
(*Compare Hermes – the Egyptian Thoth – the alchemists’ trickster god, patron of travellersbetween ‘worlds,’ merchants, hegemons, orators, and thieves. See Albrecht Dürer’s “Allegory of Eloquence” engraving at top this essay)
We might observe here that Major Arcana card number seven (7) in the Tarot deck – “The four Sevens” according to Lévi, corresponding to netzach, the seventh Sefira (’emanation’) in Cabala, and preceding Justice (8), corresponding to hod (left “foot”) which we examined earlier – is known as The Chariot.
VII. The Chariot. | Tarot card from the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, 1909. (Source: Wikipedia)
The fourth ritual celebration in the Nazi liturgical year was held on the last Sunday in March. It was called the “Pledging of the Youth”:
This was analogous to confirmation in the Christian churches. It was the day on which the 14 year old boys and girls could transfer to the Hitler-Youth (Hitler-Jugend) or League of German Girls (Bund deutscher Mädel) from the corresponding “junior leagues” of these organizations. Although this was an individual rite of passage, it had national significance as a time of celebrating the commitment of youth to the movement.[42]
Note the parallels with March For Our Lives’ express encouragement of American youth to enrol to vote – an individual rite of passage – and urging their commitment to the movement and the cause.
Indeed, David Hogg’s speechwriter appears to have understood these ‘magic’ techniques all too well – these very themes were embedded throughout his oration. Pay careful attention:
Now, who here is gonna show up and vote in the 2018 election? If you listen real close, you can hear the people in power shaking.
We are going to make this the voting issue. We are going to take this to every election, every state and every city.
We are going to make sure the best people get in our elections to run, not as politicians but as Americans. Because this .. this (points to Capitol Hill behind him) .. is not cutting it.
Now is the time to come together, not as Democrats, not as Republicans, but as Americans. Americans of the same flesh and blood that care about one thing and one thing only, and that’s the future of this country and the children that are going to lead it.
Now, they will try to separate us in demographics, they will try to separate us by religion, race, congressional district, and class: they will fail!
We, will come together, we, will get rid of these public servants that only serve the gun lobby, and We Will Save Lives! You are those heroes.
Note carefully the messianic implications of this rhetoric.
So let’s take this to our local legislators, and let’s take this to mid-term elections, because without the persistent heat*, without the persistence of voters and Americans everywhere getting out to every election, democracy will not flourish; but it can, and it will.
We can, and we will, change the world!
(*alchemy procedure)
The timing of these rituals (Jewish Shabbat HaGadol / War of the Egyptian Firstborn, Nazi Pledging of the Youth, and March For Our Lives) is also noteworthy – the beginning of Spring, celebrated since antiquity for its association with rebirth, change, the fresh and the new, the blossoming of new life after the ‘death’ of winter.
This was also the time of the 11 day Akitu harvest (barley-cutting, or “reaping”) festival in ancient Babylon, honouring their supreme god Marduk, whose star was Jupiter, and his son Nabû, the god of writing, for their victory over the monster of primeval chaos.
Messiah Hogg’s speechwriter also made reference to these associations, at the very beginning, the middle, and towards the end of his speech.
One might even perceive a cryptic reference to the Talmudic legend of the Egyptian firstborns’ revolt against Pharoah, the “miraculous” transformation of evil into good (for the benefit of the Hebrews, enabling their “liberty”), in his very first words:
The cold grasp of corruption shackles the district of Columbia. The winter is over. Change is here. The sun shines on a new day and the day is ours. (0.02)
Today is the beginning of spring, and tomorrow is the beginning of democracy. (2:14)
This is the start of the spring and the blossoming of our democracy. So let’s take this to our local legislators, and let’s take this to mid-term elections, because without the persistent heat, without the persistence of voters and Americans everywhere getting out to every election, democracy will not flourish; but it can, and it will. (3:15)
Doubtless many will forgive the speechwriter taking .. ahem .. liberties, with the truth. Even on the Great Sabbath. After all, an “approved amulet” – like the hamsa Evil Eye – is an exception to the ‘divine’ rules. The official beginning of Spring 2018 was .. ahem .. 4 days earlier, on 20 March.
There are some interesting conclusions that may now be drawn.
Stephen Flowers’ review of Nazi ritual in the Third Reich must be understood in context of his being a practicing member of the Temple of Set, and his work being an openly stated apologia for left-hand path philosophy. He is, understandably, reluctant to voice interpretations that non-practitioners of the left-hand path might seize upon as confirming a ‘Satanic’ or ‘demonic’ (i.e., metaphysical) dimension to Nazi rituals and practices. The following should serve as a summary example, and speak volumes for the discerning reader:
In the final analysis we must again ask ourselves whether the Nazis are in any real sense to be aligned with the left-hand path. On the essential element of self-deification, the Nazis present a mixed picture. [..] The deification in Nazism is contained not in the individual, and not in the whole of the human species (as with Communism) but in the particular organic strain known as the Aryans. It is the Volk as an organic construct which will reach the state of divinity in the National Socialist model.
The Nazis were to separate this new “god” from all others, and develop it to a new level of being. If there is a crux to the issue of whether they practiced any sort of “black magic,” surely this is it. The Nazi represents a race-based nationalistic rebellion against the natural cosmic order (or perhaps modern “conventional order”), just as the true Black Magician represents that rebellion in the individual ego.
This fact negates the viability of the essential individualistic component to the practice of the left-hand path. The individual is almost totally irrelevant in the ideology of Nazism – except as a mythic heroic model for behaviour suited to the aims of the State.[43]
Sound familiar?
One feels compelled to suggest the possibility of uncomfortably close correspondences with other self-idealised and separated ‘heroic’ groups, such as (paradoxically, at first glance) Party goodthinkers in George Orwell’s dystopian 1984, and the messianic “heroes” of March For Our Lives.
In context, we might also think to take a much closer and far more critical view of the mainstream media, the ‘entertainment’ industries, technology industries (in particular, those associated with genetic and gender ‘modification’, Big Data, artificial intelligence, transhumanism), and various sects of Christian determinism, Islamic fundamentalism, and rabbinic Judaism.
As a form of Lesser Magic these rituals had many functions. Among them were the forging of a focused “mass will” of the Volk, the creation of a deep sense of self-consciousness as an organic entity, the bonding of that entity to a set of symbols, the projection of the entity through those symbols back in time to the ancestors and forward in time to the descendants.
Indeed the Nazis did use magic of a most sophisticated and modern kind. The Lesser Magical use of symbolism and spectacle to manipulate and direct the masses is only rivalled by Madison Avenue. [..] The degree to which these methods could be called Black magic is open to interpretation. In that the aims are usually collectivist and thought to be “ordained by Nature,” they would seem to be more “white magical.” But seen from the level of the selected (separated and independent) folk-group the picture becomes darker. The separated group, with its own idiosyncratic characteristics, imposes its will on the environment around it – contrary to the “natural” flow of convention and historical development.
National Socialism might best be described as a uniquely post-modern, organic school of the left-hand path. They have an organic, collective basis (Folk), but do have a gradual (initiatory) perspective on the transformation of the entity in question from its mundane into its divine state using magical means – a triumph of the will.[44]
As can be seen, the key concepts associated with ‘Lesser’ Black Magic are (1) separation of a selected (“chosen”) group, (2) having its own “idiosyncratic” characteristics, that is (3) bonded to a set of symbols, and that (4) seeks to impose its will on its environment, (5) contrary to the “natural,” the conventional, dare one say “traditional” and historic flow… and, most importantly, with an aim, motive, or intent, that is self-Deifying or messianic in character.
In this context then, consider the defiant declaration of intent to impose its will on others evidenced in the Mission Statement of the March For Our Lives movement. Observe that this imposition of the will – the ‘magic’ of transforming one’s environment in accordance with self-interest – is rhetorically justified by self-identification with a messianic ideal; a form of self-Deification that is fundamental to the left-hand (‘satanic’) path:
We came together on March 24th and through continued unity, we will save lives. We will not stop our advocacy until we see the change we demand – a change that is necessary in order to save innocent lives across our nation.
******************
REFERENCES
[1] Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-hand Path: A History of Spiritual Dissent (1997, Second Edition). Runa-Raven Press, Texas. pp. 124-125
[2] Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928, Renewed 1955), IG Publishing, New York (2005). p. 37
[3] George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (2003 Centennial edition), Plume Harcourt Brace, USA. p. 217
[4] chabad.org – links in text. (retrieved April 6, 2018)
[5] Mark Passio, Natural Law, seminar at Yale Omni, October 2013 (YouTube, retrieved January 2018)
[6] chabad.org – links in text. (retrieved April 6, 2018)
[13] Hod (Kabbalah), Non-Jewish occult associations, Wikipedia (retrieved April 6, 2018)
[14] Éliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine And Ritual, A.E. Waite translation, George Redway, London (1896). p.95
[15] Éliphas Lévi, History of Magic, A.E. Waite translation (Second edition). William Rider and Son Limited, London (1922), p. 527
[16] Éliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine And Ritual, A.E. Waite translation, George Redway, London (1896). p. 94
[17] ibid., p. 320
[18] ibid., p. 367
[19] Ann Marie Roos, ‘Magic Coins’ and ‘Magic Squares’: The Discovery of Astrological Sigils in the Oldenburg Letters, Notes and Records of the Royal Society (2008) 62, p. 271–288, citing Deborah E. Harkness, John Dee’s conversations with angels: cabala, alchemy, and the end of nature (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 174., and Ludwig Blau, ‘Angelology: cabalistic view’, jewishencyclopedia.com (accessed 1 December 2007)
[20] Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-hand Path: A History of Spiritual Dissent (1997, Second Edition). Runa-Raven Press, Texas. p. 115
[21] ibid., p. 100 – Note that by “Classicism,” Flowers does not mean the 18th century artistic movement of Neoclassicism but rather the “freedom,” “equality,” and “rational” self-interest promoting philosophistries of Liberalism – the Christian values-inverting doctrines of ‘enlightened’ ‘luminaries’ such as Bernardus Mandeville (“Private Vices, Publick Virtues”), formalised in the ‘useful’ ethics, ‘felicific’ (pleasure-seeking, hedonistic) calculus, and Defence of Usury of Jeremy Bentham (“Principles of Morals and Legislation”).
[22] Vladimir Karpenko; John A. Norris, Vitriol in the History of Chemistry (2002), Chem. Listy 96, 997–1005 (2002).
[23] Anne Varichon, Couleurs : Pigments et teintures dans les mains des peuples, p. 112 (cited in Wikipedia, retrieved April 8, 2018)
[24] Daniel V. Thompson, The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting, p. 103. (Cited in Wikipedia, retrieved April 8, 2018)
[25] Anne Varichon, Couleurs : Pigments et teintures dans les mains des peuples, p. 112 (cited in Wikipedia, retrieved April 8, 2018)
[27] Dragon’s blood, Wikipedia (retrieved April 10, 2018)
[28] Roy Allan Anderson, Unfolding the Revelation (Revised). Pacific Press Publishing Association, Boise Idaho, Oshawa Ontario, Canada (1953, 1961, 1974). Library of Congress Catalogues Card No 61-10884. pp 125-127. Cited by HackYa, Babylonian Sun Seal Square (retrieved 6 April 2018)
[30] Rabbi Jack Riemer, Appreciating and knowing the Bible, then and now, Jewish News Syndicate, June 11, 2017 (retrieved 8 April 2018). For more detailed examination, cf. Hebrew and Babylonian Traditions, The Haskell Lectures delivered at Oberlin College in 1913, since revised and enlarged, by Morris Jastrow, Jr., Ph.D. New York: Scribner, 1914 – “Jastrow holds that the waning of the moon was in Babylonia a time of anxiety, and that the people were especially anxious to propitiate their gods before entering upon it. He finds several passages of the Old Testament (II Kings 4:23; Amos 8:5; Hos. 2:13; Isa. 1:13; Ezek. 46:1) in which the feast of the New Moon and the Sabbath are classed together, and thinks that the Sabbath in Israel also began as a festival connected with the full moon.” (George A Barton review, American Journal of Theology, doi/pdfplus/10.1086/479398, pp. 426-7)
[32] Kaufman Kohler; Lewis Ginsberg, Asmodeus or Ashmedai, jewishencyclopedia.com (retrieved April 10, 2018)
[33] Ann Marie Roos, ‘Magic Coins’ and ‘Magic Squares’: The Discovery of Astrological Sigils in the Oldenburg Letters, Notes and Records of the Royal Society (2008) 62, p. 271–288
[34] Israel Regardie, The Tree of Life: A Study in Magic (Second edition), Samuel Weiser Inc, York Beach, Maine (1968), p. 199-200
[35] Éliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine And Ritual, A.E. Waite translation, George Redway, London (1896). p.242
[36] Menachem Wecker, What is a Hamsa?, myjewishlearning.com (retrieved April 10, 2018)
[37] Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-hand Path: A History of Spiritual Dissent (1997, Second Edition). Runa-Raven Press, Texas. p. 121
[38] ibid., p. 128
[39] ibid., p. 124
[40] ibid., p. 127
[41] Rabbi Robin Podolsky, Chariot of Fire, March for Our Lives, jewishjournal.com 28 March 2018 (retrieved April 6, 2018)
[42] Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-hand Path: A History of Spiritual Dissent (1997, Second Edition). Runa-Raven Press, Texas. p. 126
Every body may give forth from it self, the good or evil,
Venome or Medicine latent in it…
Therefore, you are to know, that in Antimony also there is a Spirit,
which effects whatsoever in it, or can proceed from it,
in an invisible way and manner, no otherwise,
than as in the Magnet is absconded a certain invisible power…
[T]he efficacious Spirit, and operative power of Antimony,
manifests its gifts, and distributes them among Men,
being first loosed from its own body,
and freed from all its bonds, so, that it is able to penetrate,
and render fit to be applyed to those Uses,
which the Artificer proposed to himself in Preparation.
Basilius Valentinius, The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony, 1604
Women’s demonstration for bread and peace – March the 8th, 1917, Petrograd, Russia (Source: Wikipedia)
Happy International Women’s Day!
Did you know that the global celebration of women began with the International Socialist Women’s Conference in 1910? Or that the active participation of Russia’s women workers in 1917, who celebrated this day with a strike against hunger and World War 1, unintentionally brought on the October (Bolshevik) Revolution, the creation of the USSR, and the gruesome “Red Terror” slaughter of between 40 and 66 million of their fellow Russian citizens?
Alexandra Kolontai, a feminist leader of the socialist revolution, wrote about the fact and about the 8th March .. “The Women Workers’ Day on the 8th March 1917 was a memorable day in history. The revolution of February had just begun.”
[Leon] Trotski wrote, “23 February (8th March) was International Woman’s Day and meetings and actions were foreseen. But we did not imagine that this ‘Women’s Day’ would inaugurate the revolution. Revolutionary actions were foreseen but without date. But in [the] morning, despite the orders to the contrary, textile workers left their work in several factories and sent delegates to ask for support of the strike… which led to mass strike… all went out into the streets.”
It is, alas, a tragedy unsurprising, that the noble, virtuous and peaceful, mother’s-love intentions of Russia’s women workers were used, manipulated and abused, by and for others’ – the Artificers’ – malicious and malevolent ends.
Such has long been the sine qua non of the alchemist in the art of words and letters; that is to say, the Cabalist:
The Cabala has been interpreted as a means of understanding the cosmos, the emanations of God, “the framework of practical magic,” but also as a psychological technique.
Cabala and alchemy are comparable in their methods of manipulation; the former lexical, the latter elemental. The transmutation of letters to their prime state can be seen as parallel to the alchemical discipline of transmutation of metals to their base elements.
I would like, if I may, to mark this International Women’s Day with some reflections, of a paradoxical nature.
That is to say, reflections on the coincidentia oppositorum. The union of opposites.
And perhaps, more importantly, on what is understood, just quietly, by ancient through post-modern alchemists, as the “law of inversion.”
Or, as lords of the left-hand path might say, the law of reversal.
I am motivated to do so by my deep concern for the future, indeed, the survival of the human race; and, in particular, my concern for the very essence, the principle, the “efficacious Spirit”, of the Mother nature in the Female of the human species:
If someone had told you 10 years ago that it would soon become tantamount to a speechcrime to say ‘Men cannot get pregnant’, you would have thought them mad. That would be like punishing someone for saying, ‘Humans need oxygen to survive’. And yet here we are, in 2017 [2018], where PC has spun so violently out of control, and the cult of gender-neutrality has become so unwieldy, that one of the most controversial things you can say these days is: ‘Only women can get pregnant.’
We are living through a collapse of the most basic moral and biological categories of speech and understanding. Avoiding offence is now prized more highly than physical reality and truth. And one of the worst consequences of this rush to institute trans terminology — above the heads of a mostly bamboozled populace — is the erasure of womanhood. The very term ‘women’ is in serious danger.
The idea of womanhood, the terminology of womanhood, is being erased from public life. We are effectively saying there is nothing special or distinctive about being a woman. Anyone can be a woman, simply by declaring it. We can dress this up as much as we like in the language of tolerance and open-mindedness but it strikes me as plain old misogyny to treat womanhood as such a casual, easily achieved thing.
Rather, it is the intended result of lexical transformations.
Manipulations.
It is the result of alchemy.
Alchemy practiced on the mind matter of human nature.
The Female nature, in particular.
Consider the words of Edward Bernays, founder of the ‘modern’ alchemical art of “Public Relations” – or, to use the title of his own book, the art of “Propaganda”:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
The erasure of womanhood is the intentional result of “those Uses which the Artificer proposed to himself,” in setting his skills to work on the mind matter of Venus – of Mother Love herself.
[O]f the highest things the lowest are made,
and the lowest the highest,
so that, a Medicament is produced of Venome,
and of Venome Medicine;
of the sweet, bitter, acid, and corrosive;
and on the contrary of the corrosive,
another thing more profitable.
Previously, I have written at length explaining and evidencing the history, and method, of the adepts in the art of Hermes the trickster god, and his magnetically-attractive “golden chains of eloquence”.
“Allegory of Eloquence”, Albrecht Dürer, c. 1498. (British Museum)
Today, I would like to draw your attention to an alchemical symbol with which you will most likely be quite familiar – the symbol of the female, Venus ♀ (copper) – and its exact symbolic opposite, inversion, or reversal, antimony .
French alchemist and esoteric author Fulcanelli conceived antimony as “a chaos, the foster mother of all metals.” Sendovogius (1659) spoke of it as “the womb and reef of gold and the seedbed of its tincture.” Chevalier and Gheerant (Dictionary of Symbols) inform us that antimony “was also held to be ‘the bastard child of Saturn; passionately loved by Venus’.”
It is Venome and a most swift poison,
also it is void of Venome
and a most excellent Medicine…
Soon you will see why.
Antimony is a lustrous, brittle, blue-white crystal, one of six commonly recognised metalloids; that is, a chemical element with liminal properties, in between metals and non-metals, or a mixture of both. It has been known since ancient times, found in nature in a toxic, compound form called stibnite (antimony trisulphide). Stibnite is a lead-grey (Saturn ♄) colour, tarnishing to black or iridescent with exposure to air, but when polished, turning white.
Known as كحل“kohl” in Arabic, powdered stibnite has been used in the Middle East, North Africa and Mediterranean regions since 3100 BC as a cosmetic, to darken the eyelids, lashes and brows. Roman historian and naturalist Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD) mentions several other names, including the “very common” platyophthalmos, “wide-eye” (from the effect). Kohl (from which comes the English alcohol) is blue in colour.
In Biblical Hebrew, kohl is known as כָּחַלkâchal. It is mentioned in the Book of Ezekiel (23:40) as the eye paint of Hebrew whores. Along with the modern Israeli Hebrew word כחול \ כָּחֹלkaḥól(“blue“), these words all derive from a common Semitic root, k-ḥ-l.
Curiously, according to the Talmudic midrash Numbers Rabbah 14:3 (cf. Exodus 24:10, Ezekiel 1:26), a sapphire blue, not unlike that of the modern Israeli flag – a darker shade than the biblical blue of holy garments (תְּכֵלֶת tchélet) – is seen in rabbinic tradition as symbolising God’s Glory and purity, and his Gevurah (severity, judgement).
Bearing in mind what we have learned previously about the alchemists’ all-important “Rebus” (punning) principle, it is interesting to consider also the Hebrew word קָהָלqâhâl or kahal, meaning a convoked (“called out”) group or assembly “for evil counsel, war or invasion, religious [judicial] purposes”. Kahal is the name for the theocratic organisational structure in ancient Hebrew society, and, in later centuries, the title of Ashkenazi Jews’ autonomous governments, notably in Poland and Tsarist Russia. These became the subject of some notoriety when Jacob Brafmann, a 19th century Russian Jew who converted to Orthodoxy, authored two books (The Book of the Kahal, and The Local and Universal Jewish Brotherhoods), claiming the kahal was “an international network under the control of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and had as its aim undermining Christian entrepreneurs, taking over their property and ultimately seizing power.”
It is also of coincidental interest that in popular (folk) etymology, antimony (from Greek ἀντίμοναχός anti-monachos or possibly French antimoine)means monk-killer.
Returning then to antimony as an ancient eye cosmetic, associated both with female nobility and royalty (Egyptian) and also with whores (Hebrew), readers of my previous essays (here, here, here) will recall that alchemical (and Cabalist) lore is radically misogynous at its core. The universe, and every thing in it, is conceived as being a union or “sacred marriage” of opposite principles – Male and Female ‘genders’ – wherein the Male is identified with all that is Good, and the Female with all that is Evil.
For the alchemist, the Female aspect, present in all things, is “represented by every conceivable repulsive female figure — by witches, mixers of poison, whores, chthonic goddesses, by the ‘dragon mother’ so often cited in depth psychology. All these are metaphors for the demonic nature of the feminine.'”
In order to achieve the alchemists’ (and Cabalists’) ultimate goal – the transformation of himself into a god – he must first destroy the autonomous existence of the ‘evil’ female principle, stealing her gynergy or feminine birth-force powers in the process, in order to “absorb the Mother of the Universe into himself” and so become an androgynous superMan:
Experimenting around with the primal material sounds quite harmless to someone who is not initiated. Yet a symbolic murder is hidden behind this. The black matter, a symbol of the fundamental feminine and of powerful nature from which we all come, is burned or in some cases vaporized, cut to pieces or dismembered. Thus, in destroying the prima materia we at the same time destroy our “mother” or, basically, the “fundamentally feminine”.
Naturally, the sensible female is hardly likely to go along with such malevolent designs.
Thus, the alchemists’ ‘need’ for the art of deception.
Puns.
And a mercurial (quicksilver) tongue:
Since at the end of the sexual magic rituals the masculine principle alone remains, the verbal praise of the goddess, beauty and love (♀) could also be manipulative, designed to conjure up the devotion of a woman.
[W]e must regard such charming flattery of the female sex as at the very least a non-committal, albeit extremely lucrative embellishment. But they are more likely to be a deliberately employed manipulation, so as to draw attention away from the monstrosities of the .. ritual system. Perhaps they are themselves a method (upaya) with which to appropriate the “gynergy” of the women so charmed.
On this International Women’s Day, let us remember how this celebration of women came to be.
Let us remember how actions borne of virtuous female hearts – the Mother’s love, the beauty of the nurturing, life-giving feminine, of Venus in all her glory – were transformed from a protest against hunger and war, into the catalyst for more.
By many orders of magnitude.
Let us remember, and never forget, the alchemists, the Cabalists, and their clever philosophistries.
Their “royal art” of deception.
Seeking to destroy the autonomous existence of the Female – to steal the essence, the very principle of Woman herself.
The circle – is it closed? And is there really no way out? And is there only one thing left for us to do, to wait without taking action? Maybe something will happen by itself? It will never happen as long as we daily acknowledge, extol, and strengthen – and do not sever ourselves from the most perceptible of its aspects: Lies.
When violence intrudes into peaceful life, its face glows with self-confidence, as if it were carrying a banner and shouting: “I am violence. Run away, make way for me – I will crush you.” But violence quickly grows old. And it has lost confidence in itself, and in order to maintain a respectable face it summons falsehood as its ally – since violence lays its ponderous paw not every day and not on every shoulder. It demands from us only obedience to lies and daily participation in lies – all loyalty lies in that.
And the simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right there: Personal non-participation in lies. Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace everything, but not with any help from me.
– Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Live Not By Lies
*****************
REFERENCES
Adam McLean, Basil Valentine: His Triumphant Chariot of Antimony, with Annotations of Theodore Kirkringus (1678), transcribed by Ben Fairweather (accessed 8 March 2018)
World March of Women International Secretariat, 8th of March – International woman’s day: in search of the lost memory, 13 March 2011 (accessed 8 March 2018, web archive copy)
The buzzard told the monkey “You are chokin’ me
“Release your hold, and I will set you free”
The monkey looked the buzzard right dead in the eye
And said “Your story’s so touching but it sounds just like a lie”
Jordan B. Peterson would appreciate this moment of synchronicity. After all, he is well-versed in Jung.
A friend in the northern hemisphere tweeted a video clip of a Peterson interview yesterday on BBC Radio 5. I just happened to see his tweet, five hours later.
In reference to young men, he said:
“They’re desperate for a discussion about responsibility and fair play and noble being and working properly in the world, and to hear the idea that their lives actually matter; that if they straighten themselves up and fly right that they’ll have a beneficial effect on themselves and their family and community, and that the world is starving for that, and for them, as individuals; not for them as a group but for each of them as individuals.”
When I heard those words spoken, my memory instantly flashed to consciousness the 1943 hit song by Nat King Cole:
A buzzard took a monkey for a ride in the air
Monkey thought that everything was on the square
The buzzard tried to throw the monkey off his back
But the monkey grabbed his neck and said “Now listen, jack”
“Straighten up and fly right
“Straighten up and stay right
“Straighten up and fly right
“Cool down papa, don’t you blow your top
“Ain’t no use in divin’
“What’s the use of jivin’
“Straighten up and fly right
“Cool down papa, don’t you blow your top.”
The buzzard told the monkey “You are chokin’ me
“Release your hold, and I will set you free”
The monkey looked the buzzard right dead in the eye
And said “Your story’s so touching but it sounds just like a lie”
I instantly knew – by intuition, buttressed by knowledge, acquired recently and reviewed only yesterday – what this idiom really means.
It has a profound significance.
I doubt that many today – if any – fully appreciate what these allegorical lyrics mean. Wikipedia provides a helpful hint, by dint of the background story:
The song was based on a black folk tale that Cole’s father had used as a theme for one of his sermons. In the tale, a buzzard takes different animals for a joy ride. When he gets hungry, he throws them off on a dive and eats them for dinner. A monkey who had observed this trick goes for a ride; he wraps his tail around the buzzard’s neck and gives the buzzard a big surprise by nearly choking him to death.
The phrase “straighten up and fly right” is said to mean:
Fig. to improveone’sbehavior or attitudeandperformbetter.(Originallyreferred to an airplane.)
in. to get serious and start behaving properly.
Clearly this is the context in which Peterson used it.
But there is far more to this allegory. I think it extremely important that we fully understand it:
And therefore, it is wisely said, that the stone is born of the spirit, because it is altogether spiritual. For the vulture himself flying without wings cries upon the top of the mountain, saying, I am the white brought forth from the black, and the red brought forth from the white, the citrine son of the red; I speak the truth and lie not.
[F]or the vulture flying in the air without wings, cries out that it might get up upon the mountain, that is upon the waters, upon which the “spiritus albus” or spirit of whiteness is born.
The vulture flying through the air, and the toad creeping upon the ground, are the emblems of our magistery.
Last evening – again, just by ‘coincidence’ – I had tweeted a lengthy thread of quotations from a book I am reading, written by a PhD scholar. The author’s preface openly states his purpose:
This book was composed in large measure as a response to the irrational “Satanic scare” of the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was written with the intention of reaching a wide readership of thinking individuals capable of understanding the historical and cultural scope of ideas underlying the images of the left-hand path. [..] It should also be noted that the author of this book is not a Satanist, but is a practitioner of the left-hand path based on purely indigenous European models.
Stated more simply, the book is a scholarly defense of Satanist ideology, and so-called “black magic[k]”.
In earlier essays, such as Cheating Females Parts 1 and 2 (here, here), Ode to Debt (18+) (here), and Stags and Unicorns: The Alchemical Root of the Normalisation of Cheating (here), I have demonstrated that the left-hand path philosophy has been deeply embedded in modern western culture. It is increasingly evident – brazenly so – in the decadence, nihilism, and orchestrated chaos of postmodern western culture.
Indeed, the “Satanic” philosophy is literally the driving force of ‘our’ capital-ist,¹ Mammon-worshipping (and thereby enslaved) world. I have shown that it is at the very core of double-entry accounting, ‘modern’ banking, and the creation of our ‘money’ supply in the form of Balance Sheet credebt records, deceitfully rented to us at “interest” (usury, compounding):
..Freud cites overcoming incapacity for work as a major motive for entering a pact with the Devil. [..] A major psychological feature of black magic is that it provides immediate gains without immediate payment. The payment is feared as “really” both deferred and excessive. Thus deferred and excessive payment for immediate gain is characteristically associated with pacts with the Devil. The aversion towards usury, in current times as well as throughout the history of Christianity, is not completely coincidental. For usury is exactly a social expression of the Satanic Pact, immediate gains and excessive deferred payment.²
To my repeated assertion that Satanic philosophy is the driving force of modern and (especially) postmodern western capitalist culture, our scholar would appear to agree:
“The existence of the left-hand path is not easily discovered, but once its principles have been uncovered it slowly becomes apparent just how widespread the philosophy is.”
“[T]he basic precepts of the left-hand path have for centuries penetrated far beyond the sphere of magical and occult activity.”
“[M]odern philosophies and political ideologies have fully embraced principles basic and fundamental to the left-hand path, almost all of which have become the accepted norm in the west.”
The true significance of the allegorical sermon by Nat King Cole’s father becomes clear only when we understand the origin and meaning of the left-hand path, versus the right-hand path.
We see then that, rather than “the devil in the detail”, in the lyrics of the song we find the exact opposite: “Le bon Dieu est dans le détail” (“the good God is in the detail”).
I will now present some excerpts from our left-hand path scholar’s book, trusting that your eyes will be opened, and you will see. Note that italicised emphasis is in the original; bold is mine:
The actual origin of the right-hand versus left-hand path terminology itself is rooted in the vocabulary of Indian tantric sects. The two main divisions of these are the dakshinachara, “right-way” and the vamachara, “left-way”. [..] The eventual elaboration of the right-hand/left-hand path distinction is quite complex, but its origins are most probably rooted in the widespread tantric doctrines of a natural flow of universal force through the human body along a left to right line – entering the left, exiting the right. This is mirrored by a cosmic flow of force from the north to the south. When the human being is oriented toward the east this flow pattern is said to be in harmony with the one natural to his body, as his left hand is to the north, his right hand to the south. Here are the roots of the key to the common antinomianism, reversal of patterns, found in left-hand path tantrism. To reverse the left to right pattern, contrary to nature and cosmic law, requires an exercise of the faculty of will. This is an act of rebellion against nature and against divinely ordained cosmic order. [..] In going against this flow, individuals more fully articulate – individuate – themselves within their environments. Independence and freedom are attained and maintained – perhaps even personal immortality is to be gained.
Julius Evola remarks on the distinction between the two paths:
“The creative and productive aspect of the cosmic process is signified by the right hand, by the color white, and by the two goddesses Uma and Gauri… . The second aspect, that of conversion and return (exitus, reditus) is signified by the left hand, by the color black, and by the dark, destructive goddesses Durga and Kali. Thus according to the Mahakala Tantra, when the left and the right hands are in equilibrium we experience samsara, but when the left hand prevails, we find liberation.”
Alain Daniélou remarks that the left-hand path corresponds to a “disintegrating tendency” (tamas) which “uses the power of Nature, the passions and instincts of man, to conquer, with their aid, the world of the senses… This way leads directly from the physical to the abstract because … the descending tendency is at both ends of the manifested, [therefore the left-hand path] may utilize even eroticism or drunkenness as a means of spiritual achievement.”
Clearly the left-hand path .. is associated both with the idea of dis-integration (separation) and with the practice of antinomianism – of “going against the grain” of conventions in order to gain spiritual power.
Here it is quite clear, at least from the masculine perspective,³ that the essence of the vamachara [left-way] is the total transformation of the human initiate into something superhuman or god(dess)-like.
One of the significant differences between the two tantric paths, although both are under aegis of Shiva, is that on the right-hand path the adept always experiences “someone above him,” even at the highest level of realization. However, on the left-hand path the adept “becomes the ultimate sovereign” (chakravartin = world ruler).
It is tempting to expand this essay with details of the antinomian “aberrations” that are practiced on the left-hand path in pursuit of its goal. But to do so would, I think, detract from the importance of the thematic understanding here presented, thanks to Jordan Peterson, a black folk tale, Nat King Cole and his preacher man father, my Twitter friend on the other side of the planet, and what was, for me, a spirit-raising moment of Jungian synchronicity.
If you feel compelled to learn more of the (disturbing) details, then you may wish to read my earlier essays mentioned above. One further quotation from our PhD scholar will be mildly suggestive:
Ultimately, [Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis] de Sade holds that the pursuit of pleasure is the object of human life, and that physical satisfaction is more noble than the merely mental. Happiness depends on the greatest possible extension of pleasure. This is done by enlarging the scope of one’s tastes and fantasies. It is only through wilful imagination that the possibilities for pleasure are extended. Social or religious conditioning prevents this in most cases. Finally, happiness is not so much found in the enjoyment of pleasure as in the desire itself and in the destruction of obstacles in the way of its accomplishment.
For de Sade the greatest pleasures were to be found in overcoming things which may have at one time inspired fear or disgust.
Whether in the sexual or more abstract philosophical sphere, the truest definition of Sadism .. is: “The pleasure felt from the observed modifications on the external world produced by the will of the observer.”
Suffice it to say, the allegory of the trickster buzzard who offers to take you on a jivin’, “fly left” joy ride – one that will “set you free” – is a profoundly cautionary tale:
“It is quite understandable why the forces of orthodox Christianity fought every advance in scientific, political, or religious philosophy, for each advance in spiritual freedom and enforcement of the interests of plurality over unity is indeed a victory for the Prince of Darkness – the principle of isolate intelligence…”
“Evil is the conscious attempt to make the conditions of existence more pathological than they have to be, and it’s motivated by conscious intent.”
The buzzard told the monkey “You are chokin’ me
“Release your hold, and I will set you free”
The monkey looked the buzzard right dead in the eye
And said “Your story’s so touching but it sounds just like a lie”
UPDATE 3 Feb 2018:
Recommend reading this article on the gnostic underpinnings of Jordan Peterson’s philosophy. Compare with Cabala’s origins. Readers of my other essays will hopefully recognise the fundamental connections between gnosticism, cabala, and left-hand path philosophies.
*****************
REFERENCES
Stephen E. Flowers PhD, Lords of the Left-hand Path: A History of Spiritual Dissent
¹ If the reader is tempted to assume that I am opposed to the ideology of capitalism alone, I would say only that there was insufficient time and space to address the subject here. Please consider that I am somewhat widely read on the true origins, intent, and consequences of ‘Marxian’ socio-economic theories; thus my views on what I consider to be an artificial opposition are likely more nuanced than you may have presumed.
² David Bakan, Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition
I recommend giving thought to this man’s words. But do not watch if you are unable to ignore vulgar, and/or blasphemous language, in the interest of gaining understanding.
“Of course, if I get disassociated from by a domination of empirical science I could be objectified into nihilism but apart from that little hiccup…”
The only way for economists to earn public faith in their profession, is to repent, and cease from practicing cabalists’ magic.
One year ago, economists were trusted far less than hairdressers, and the ordinary man or woman in the street.
Today, as the curtain closes on a tumultuous year Two Thousand Seventeen of the Common (until recently, Christian) Era, and the portents of war, of financial, social, ecological and civilisational collapse, and the gloomy dawn of a new Dark Age ruled by a small cabal of neo-feudal globalist oligarchs hang ominously in the air, the economics profession continues to do what it does best.
It has become routine to assault the “dismal science” with a dismal ignorance of what economics actually involves. Writers, students and even some social scientists from other disciplines who have very little exposure to what economists do are quick to point the finger and declare economics as a veil for vested interest, and dismiss it as a way of thinking that is fossilised in numbers.
Sometimes, though, the criticism can even come from within the economics bubble itself.
Oh the irony.
Economic theory has always been a veil for vested interest: the interest of the Usurocracy.
Economists’ “way of thinking” has been fossilised in numbers since the thirteenth century rise of cabalist theurgy: the magic equilibrium numerological ‘science’ of angelology and demonology.
Economists exist in a bubble of historical ignorance. They broadly fail to search outside their prescribed textbooks for knowledge and understanding of the true origin of the fundamental ideas and beliefs within their own discipline. Heterodox economists calling for a Reformation, or revolution in economic thinking, are just as endarkened as the orthodoxy.
Economics doesn’t need a Reformation: it needs a scientific revolution, similar to that triggered by Copernicus’s publication of “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres” in 1543. [..] This was the first great scientific revolution, and it inverted our understanding of the Universe: rather than the Sun orbiting the Earth, the Earth orbited the Sun; rather than the stars being nearby, they were far away; and gravity, not God, told the “Heavenly Bodies” how to move. [..] The revolution in astronomy that Copernicus triggered with his fundamentally different paradigm took over a century. Galileo played a key role here, by building the first serious telescope and observing four of Jupiter’s moons… [..] This revolution didn’t come peacefully, and it wasn’t led by the Ptolemaic astronomers themselves, but by new entrants to the field—including, crucially, Isaac Newton, whose equations of motion provided a mathematical explanation for why the orbits of planets were elliptical rather than circular.
Let’s unpack this. Historical context is vital.
In the Battle of Ideas between ‘science’ and ‘superstition’, as always, it’s about money:
Copernicus spent many years in Italy. Evidence suggests that ‘his’ idea crystallised while studying at the University of Padua.[2] This was the seat of libertas scholastica (academic freedom) near Venice: the fertile ground for ideas and schemes offering ‘utility’ in the confrontation, or subversion, of political or religious threats to the Venetian Republic’s profits and power. Its first offered subjects were law, and theology. Copernicus himself is said to have attributed the discovery of heliocentrism to the ancient Greek astronomer, Aristarchus of Samos.[3][4]
Galileo was a paid agent and likely dupe of Paolo Sarpi, chief of the Venetian intelligence and philosophical ridotto (think tank) networks. The controversy between Galileo and the Church was masterminded by Sarpi – his trial represented “one of the greatest public relations successes of all time.” Galileo’s status as Europe’s premier scientist followed the publication of ‘his’ astronomical findings. Sarpi was the “advisor, author, and director” of the entire project. In March 1610 he wrote that a telescope had been found in Holland two years before (my emphasis):
Once this was found, our mathematician [Galileo] of Padua and some of our other people who are not ignorant of these arts began to use the telescope on celestial bodies, adjusting it and refining it for the purpose….”[5]
Paolo Sarpi (Source: Wikipedia – Mezzotint by William Dickinson, 1777, after F. Zucchero, 1777)
The fame of alchemist and cabalist Isaac Newton and his alleged “discoveries” was also engineered by the Venetian “Deep State” network, for financial and political gain, in context of Anglo-French rivalries. The mastermind was Padua native and member of the Venetian nobility, Antonio Schinella de Conti, the duplicitous intermediary in the Leibniz-Newton calculus controversy.[6][7]
Père Conti of the French Mission in Rome, caricature by Pier Leone Ghezzi, 1674–1755. (Source: Artnet.com)
The Church hierarchy may have been empirically wrong in upholding the geocentric model of the Universe. However, the weight of emphasis given to these key historical events by modern academia abjectly fails to identify the vested financial motives underpinning the ‘scientific revolution’.
Throughout the Renaissance – also known as the Hermetic Reformation[8] – the immensely powerful Venetian oligarchy employed its sophisticated pan-European network of agents in active promotion of any ideas convenient to its financial interests. Its chief opponent, and perennial on-again-off-again antagonist or ally, was Europe’s moral and financial regulatory authority: the Catholic Church.
The Church’s teachings on usury, and a spiritual kingdom – in essence, a moral paradigm of patient endurance in suffering, and of doing good in the service of others in this life, in anticipation of spiritual reward – were anathema to a usurious patrician nobility and merchant oligarchy possessed of centuries-old envies and aspirations for earthly rule, through money and the sword.
Modern science did not begin with rare enlightened “free thinkers”, armed with reason and experimental evidence, courageously challenging the authority of superstitious obscurantism.
Nor did economic ‘science’ develop as a result of “physics envy”.
Modern science – including physics, and the ‘science’ of economics – began with thirteenth century cabalist theurgy.
Black (under cover of “white”) magic.
While the Church promoted God as the invisible force telling the Heavenly Bodies how to move (“by the Word of God”), the Venetian oligarchy promoted cabalist theurgy as the means by which man could gain control over the “spirits” controlling the motions of the Sun (gold), Moon (silver) and the planets Above. These heavenly “powers” were the key to the universal order of creation, including the world Below.
Rather than God as the invisible, personal force who could be humbly petitioned to grant requests for health and wealth “according to His will”, cabalist theurgy promoted the idea of acquiring power to command the invisible, intermediary forces responsible for health and wealth.
The secret gnosis (knowledge) of how to do this, was the Art of magic words – magic letters, embedded with magic numbers.
Magic mathematics.
The Duality Principle embedded in the double entry bookkeeping of medieval Italian merchants, and in the “rational”, pleasure/profit-maximising, magic equilibrium assumptions and equations of modern economists, is the “Enlightened” modern gnostics’ scientific title for ancient Babylonian occult philosophistry.
As proponents of black magic, the Venetian Usurocracy was initially hostile to the flourishing development of empirical science in rival Florence during the early Renaissance. Around 1600 however, the Paolo Sarpi network began rebranding the Venetian Republic as the embodiment of the most advanced and sophisticated science, representing the highest expression of scientific values.[9]
Over ensuing centuries, the Usurocracy’s network successfully smuggled its cabalist theurgic principles into all areas of modern science, promoting formalism, reductionist materialism, and in a supremely ironic example of cabalist-derived Orwellian doublethink, the fetishism of institutional (i.e, academic ‘expert’) authority.
Economists have an immensely important role in shaping the policies, regulations, and values of modern society. Few, if any, have the faintest clue that by conflating biological, material, and moral values using the balance sheet ‘logic’ of double entry, the Venetian Giammaria Ortes, and subsequent luminaries of the British Radical liberal philosophical school such as Jeremy Bentham, cleverly eliminated the “moral element”[10] from their ‘scientific’ discipline: one that was once called Moral Philosophy.
Those who do not study history, or who restrict their search for knowledge and truth to within safe reading and thinking distance of academically-approved, textbook lines of inquiry, will never discover the true origin and sign-ificance of the ideas, and (amoral) values that they practice and preach.
One wonders if St. Peter may not have been forecasting the coming of modernity’s neo-Babylonian economic theurgists, and not merely pseudo-Christian theologians, when he wrote his Second Epistle warning against false teachers:
These are wells without water, clouds that are carried with a tempest; to whom the mist of darkness is reserved for ever.
For when they speak great swelling words of vanity, they allure through the lusts of the flesh, through much wantonness, those that were clean escaped from them who live in error.
While they promise them liberty, they themselves are the servants of corruption…
[1] E. Michael Jones, “The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and its Impact on World History”, Fidelity Press (2008), p. 257 – “On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther sent 95 objections to the Catholic Church’s doctrine on indulgences to Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz. According to legend, he also nailed the theses to the door of the Schlosskirche in Wittenberg.”
[2] Jerzy Dobrzycki and Leszek Hajdukiewicz, “Kopernik, Mikołaj”, Polski słownik biograficzny(Polish Biographical Dictionary), vol. XIV, Wrocław, 1969, p. 6 (cited in Wikipedia, Nicolaus Copernicus In Italy, fn. 55; online 31 Dec 2017)
[3] Owen Gingrich, “Did Copernicus Owe a Debt to Aristarchus?”, Journal for the History of Astronomy, vol. 16, no. 1 (February 1985), pp. 37–42. (cited in Wikipedia, Nicolaus Copernicus, fn. 6; online 31 December 2017) – “Copernicus was aware of Aristarchus’ heliocentric theory and cited him in an early (unpublished) manuscript of De Revolutionibus (which still survives), though he removed the reference from his final published manuscript.” (note A)
[4] George Kish, “A Source Book in Geography”, Harvard University Press (1978), p. 51 (cited in Wikipedia, Aristarchus of Samos, fn 2; online 31 December 2017)
[5] Webster G. Tarpley, “Against Oligarchy: How the Dead Souls of Venice Corrupted Science”, The American Almanac, January, 1996.
[6]Richard S. Westfall, “Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton”, Cambridge University 1983, p. 771ff (cited in Wikipedia, Antonio Schinella Conti, fn 1; online 31 December 2017)
[7] Webster G. Tarpley, “Against Oligarchy: How the Dead Souls of Venice Corrupted Science”, The American Almanac, January, 1996.
See here ye Causes why in London,
So many Men are made, & undone,
That Arts, & honest Trading drop,
To Swarm about ye Devils shop, (A)
Who Cuts out (B) Fortunes Golden Haunches,
Trapping their Souls with Lotts and Chances, Shareing em from Blue Garters down To all Blue Aprons in the Town.
Here all Religions flock together,
Like Tame and Wild Fowl of a Feather,
Leaving their strife Religious bustle,
Kneel down to play at pitch and Hussle; (C)
Thus when the Sheepherds are at play,
Their flocks must surely go Astray;
The woeful Cause yt in these Times
(E) Honour, & (D) honesty, are Crimes,
That publickly are punish’d by
(G) Self Interest, and (F) Vilany;
So much for monys magick power
Guess at the Rest you find out more.
The South Sea Company was a British stock company founded in 1711. The company was part of the treaty during the War of Spanish Succession, which was traded in return for the company’s assumption of debt run up by England during the war. The South Sea Company was plagued with financial speculation, corruption and credulity that caused the south sea bubble in 1720 (Sperling 5). Hogarth illustrates a scene that reflects the reality of the corruption behind the bubble. When the bubble burst because of rising stock prices due to speculation, a large portion of company investors were left broke as the company crashed. These company investors were people in all walks of society. As a fraud between the company’s directors and cabinet ministers surfaced, political scandal began to cause mass chaos.
The print shows a London scene, with a statue of a giant to the left; a column to the right is erected, its base originally reads “Erected in memory of the destruction of the City by the Great Fire in 1666” but Hogarth alters the inscription to “This monument was erected in memory of the destruction of the city by the South Sea in 1720” (Stevens, 8). Hogarth does this to achieve equalizing the tragic results of the two events. St. Paul’s Cathedral is in the background. The monument represents the city’s greed juxtaposed with St. Paul’s, which represents the city’s charity (Stevens 9). In the center of the print is a large construction, which seems to represent a merry-go-round of figures representing all levels of society, indicating the ways in which the South Sea Bubble affected all classes of people. These figures include a clergyman, a prostitute, a hag, and a Scottish nobleman (Walcot 415). A goat sits atop a sign that says “Who I Ride.” [“Who’l Ride” – CM]. In the upper left, a long line of women are entering a building with a sign that says “raffling for husbands with lottery fortunes in here”. On top of the building is a set of stag antlers (Walcot 413), which is symbolic of women cuckolding or leaving husbands who have lost their money in the crash [or is it? — CM]. To the left, “Fortune” hangs by her hair, blindfolded as the devil chops off parts of her body and throws them to the crowd below (Tate). She is hanging from a balcony of the Devil’s shop, aka Guild Hall (Walcot 413). To the right, the figure of “Honesty” is broken upon a wheel of self-interest (416). A man who represents Villainy, whip in hand and a mask upside down between his legs, stares at a figure representing “Honor” as if ready to beat him. Beneath Villainy stands a monkey wearing [taking, stealing – CM] the cloak of Honor, representing mimicry (Walcot 416). A Puritan, a Jew, and a Catholic stand at bottom left, ignoring the chaos and focused on the gambling, not having learned the harsh lesson about speculation. Finally, the figure of Trade, at the very front, appears to be dead. The corpse of Trade is easy to overlook in the ensuing chaos. [1]
Let us discover what William Hogarth meant in saying that the “Devil trap[s] their Souls .. Shareing [th]em from Blue Garters down, To all Blue Aprons in the Town.”
A superficial interpretation would be that he was referring to the entire hierarchy of English society, from the highest down to the lowest classes.
In 1348, King Edward III had founded the Most Noble Order of the Garter, the highest order of English chivalry. Membership is limited to the Sovereign, the Prince of Wales, and no more than 24 members, or Companions. The garter itself is made of blue velvet trimmed with gold, and is worn on the left leg, below the knee:
When the ‘Garter’ was instituted, about 1348, its color was light blue — like the color of the regalia in private English Lodges — but soon after the accession of George I, in 1714, this light blue was changed to the present deep blue shade.[2]
But what of the “Blue Aprons”? Were the lowest classes in England associated in any way with this symbol? Not that I am aware.
There is another possibility.
William Hogarth was a freemason.[3] His father-in-law, Sir James Thornhill, was also an active member of the Craft, in “a period when to be a freemason was a fashionable activity in an environment where joining and attending clubs, coffee houses and various societies was very commonplace. Freemasonry stood out as an institution because of the quality and high ranking standing of those who had become members…”[4]
Hogarth “was born into an impoverished family, and he needed Thornhill’s introduction to join a suitable Lodge consisting of men well above his own social standing.”[5] He designed the Grand Steward’s Jewel for the Grand Lodge of England,[6] and eventually became a Grand Steward in 1734.[7]
Perhaps Hogarth, a renowned satirist, was mocking the victims of “The South Sea Scheme” at a deeper level than is commonly understood.
The Blue Apron is likely a cryptic reference to Freemasonry. A white lambskin or leather apron is said to be “the Badge of a Mason and [..] is more honorable than the Star and Garter or any other order that could be conferred upon him by King, Prince, Potentate or any other person except he be a Mason.”[8]
Recall that Hogarth depicted Villainy with a face mask that is hanging, inverted, over his groin.
On March 17th 1721 – shortly after the South Sea bubble had burst – the first Grand Lodge ordained that:
“None but the Grand Master, his Deputy and Wardens shall wear their Jewels in Gold or gilt pendant to Blue Ribbons about their Necks, and White Leather aprons with Blue Silk; which Sort of Aprons may also be worn by former Grand Officers.”
This was the first official mention of Blue Silk as a trimming for aprons, and it is clear that the Blue was originally reserved for Grand Officers. The Rawlinson MS., c. 1740, mentions: “Two Grand Masters aprons Lined with Garter blue silk and turned over two inches with white silk strings.”[9]
Originally Garter Blue was a very pale blue, “of a watery tinge”, changed under Edward VI to a mazarine or light sky blue and changed again during the Hanoverian period [probably 1745] to the current darker hue.[10]
So we see that there is clearly a connection between the Blue Garter of the Most Noble Order of royal chivalry, and the Blue-trimmed Apron of the Grand Masters of Freemasonry.
However, there is still more here than meets the eye.
“Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue, and a Silver Sixpence in her Shoe.”
It represents purity, virginity, and fidelity … and, a confirmation of the deflowering of the bride:
[T]he garter toss originates from an early 14th century French tradition called “Fingering the Garter”. [..] Post-wedding ceremony, couples would retire to the wedding chamber to consummate their marriage in order to make it all legally binding and ascertain the bride was an untouched virgin (and thus all offspring were genetically linked to the groom and his inheritance). Guests were then invited up to the room to see the groom’s deflowering handiwork, usually in the form of showing off the bed linens with their telltale post-virgin blood stain OR claiming the bride’s garter as a symbol of said consummation (likely a leftover from the tradition of the wedding girdle removal). In French the term for this was “fingering the garter,” guests checking to see if the bride was no longer a virgin by feeling near her garter. [..] In English traditions, guests would sneak into the marriage chamber to then attempt to throw discarded lingerie and stockings on the couple, whoever hit the noses of the couple with a stocking being the next to marry. In order to protect the bride from this groping crowd, grooms began throwing the garter to the mobs in order to keep them at a distance from their new bride.[11]
It is also a symbol of good fortune … to the man, other than the husband, who gets his hands on it first.[12]
The Devil traps their souls with lotts and chances,
Shareing them from Blue Garters down,
To all Blue Aprons in the Town
Perhaps what Hogarth really meant, was that the Devil had share-d the souls of the Most Noble (“Blue Garters”), down “To” all the Grand Master Masons (“Blue Aprons”).
In light of the revelations of corruption and “fraud between the company’s directors and cabinet ministers”, our interpretation may be more than merely, err, speculative.
[1] Hogarth Satires, The South Sea Scheme(online; accessed 20 December 2017) [2] Leon Zeldis FPS, 33°, PSGC, Supreme Council of the Scottish Rite for the State of Israel Honorary Adjunct Grand Master, Masonic Blue (online; accessed 20 December 2017) [3] Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon, A few famous masons (online, accessed 20 December, 2017) [4] W. Bro. Yasher Beresiner, William Hogarth: The Man, The Artist, and His masonic Circle (online, accessed 20 December 2017)
[5] ibid. [6] Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon, William Hogarth (online, accessed 20 December, 2017) [7] Masonic Dictionary, William Hogarth (online, accessed 20 December, 2017) [8] Brooks C. Dodson, Jr., Masonry and the Order of the Garter (online, accessed 20 December 2017) [9] Bro. F.R. Worts, M.A., P.A.G.D.C., The apron and its symbolism (online, accessed 20 December 2017) [10] Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon, Masonic blue (online, accessed 20 December 2017) [11] Nuptial Adventures, Traditions: Fingering the Garter, Symbols of Virginity, and Public Mortification (online; accessed 20 December 2017) [12]ibid., – “Weddings in most cultures have been considered a special moment to transfer luck or fortune, be it money, land, inheritance, good fortune, the possibility of future weddings, etc. In ye olden European wedding traditions, obtaining a trinket from the bride was always thought to be a harbinger of luck or at least future nuptials. After the couple exchanged vows, the attendees would sometimes rush up to the bride, ripping sections of her wedding finery off of her in order to obtain some of her wedding providence. The bride, in order to protect herself and her fashion choices, would then sometimes throw favors to the crowd, scarves, tokens, ribbons, garters, in order to make it to her own reception. If not quick enough though, her clothing and her garter would be forcibly removed, attendees flipping over the bride to remove her garters with her skirts over her head.”
The Sages say truly
That two animals are in this forest:
One glorious, beautiful, and swift,
A great and strong deer;
The other an unicorn.
[..]
He that knows how to tame and master them by Art,
To couple them together,
And to lead them in and out of the forest,
May justly be called a Master.
For we rightly judge
That he has attained the golden flesh,
And may triumph everywhere;
Nay, he may bear rule over great Augustus.
The Book Of Lambspring
To anyone paying attention, it should be obvious that the inverted moral value (vice) of infidelity that is actively and very profitablypromoted in the half light of public consciousness, in adultery-themed “dating” sites, apps, and “reality”TV, is now being actively normalised by mainstream media, along with ‘liberal’ academia.
This “normalisation” of cheating has exactly the same root as the accounting, banking, and money systems.
As we have seen recently, the first step in an alchemical experiment is called nigredo (“blackening”; a synonym for corruption, decay, sacrifice, death, negation).
In double entry bookkeeping, the foundation of the accounting, banking, and money systems, the first rule is also an act of negation:
For every debit there must be an equal credit, and for every credit there must be an equal debit.
In Cabala, the first act of creation by “Ein-Sof” (Infinite God) is said to be an act of self-negation (“tzimtzum”; contraction, concealment).
In mainstream “financial intermediation” theory of banking, the first principle is a pretence of self-negation: supposedly, the mere coupling together of two opposites, Savers and Borrowers.
This “normalisation” of cheating – a direct attack on the cornerstone social bonds of traditional marriage and family – aims to bring about the corruption – and destruction – of human society.
Or, as the “philosophers” of the “royal Art” prefer to frame it, the “transformation” of human society.
The first step in the “experiment”, is the decay, destruction, or negation, of traditional moral values. Only then can the alchemist bring forth “gold” from the “base”; the “higher”, from the “lower”; Order, out of Chaos.
“I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don’t want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.”
“You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”
It should not be necessary to spell out the myriad economic impacts of broken marriages, and broken homes, inclining “preferences” toward an increased “demand” (need) for debt: the Usurocracy’s exclusive monopoly “product”.
One can only wonder at the magnitude of economic inefficiencies – and wealth inequality – associated with the increased “need” to pay billions in fees to the “family” lawyer class, for example.
I would like to draw public attention to the alchemical symbolism evidencing this once covert, and now increasingly overt goal, of normalising infidelity – that is to say, lying and cheating.
In previousessays we have seen that the ancient “Art” of alchemy is an andocentric, misogynous, predatory sex magic system, whose hidden goal is the theft, manipulation, and domination, of the feminine birth-force (life, “growth”) energy, or “gynergy”.
For power and profit.
Throughout recorded history, alchemical adepts have advanced their deception by combining exoteric (outer) and esoteric (inner) doctrines, with the difference between the two cloaked in metaphor, allegory and symbolism – in particular, by means of the rebus (Latin rēbus “by means of objects”) or punning principle – thus hiding the truth in plain sight:
The Rebis (from Latin res bina, meaning dual or double matter) is the end product of the alchemical magnum opus or great work.
As we have also seen, the alchemical “Art” is based on two philosophical principles: the Unity of Opposites (exoteric), and the Law of Inversion (esoteric).
The “profane” are gulled – enchanted – by the outward appearance of beauty, nobility and virtue. Only the “illuminated” understand that the appearance cloaks a diabolic inner doctrine of inversion, that is explicitly contra naturam.
To illustrate this, let us now consider the alchemical allegory of the Stag and the Unicorn, from the Book of [Abraham] Lambspring (Frankfurt, 1625):
It seems that this little book was first published under the title De Lapide Philosophico Triga Chemicum (Prague 1599) compiled by the Frenchman Nicolas Barnaud prominent in the alchemical circles around Rudolf II.
Appearing at face value to be a work of “spiritual” alchemy, “[i]ts verses point to the soul and spirit involved in the alchemical transformation and its fifteen emblems are evocative symbols of these inner processes.”
The parable of the “deer” and the Unicorn appears to explain that the forest is “the Body”, the deer is “the Soul” , and the unicorn “the Spirit”. Knowing how to master all three “by Art” appears to be the goal aspired to.
The tinctures in alchemy relate also to the substances of the Mass, the red wine, the blood, and the white wafer, the body of Christ. Administration of the Sacraments was seen as spiritualising the souls of the partakers. In alchemical terms these white and red stones or tinctures served much the same purpose, though the alchemists achieved this, not through the intermediacy of a priest but by their own inner work of transmutation. Here alchemy links directly with the Grail stories which use similar parallels between the Grail and the Sacraments. The red tincture was occasionally symbolised by a stag bearing antlers. The stag being seen as a noble masculine animal. This links in with the Unicorn as a symbol of the white or feminine tincture. In some alchemical illustrations, such as that of the late 16th century Book of Lambspring, the Stag and Unicorn meet in the forest of the soul as part of the process of inner transformation.
We have already learned, however, that the secret inner doctrine of alchemy is one of sexual magic, and that the inversion (or reversal) of values lies at its heart.
The Stag as a symbol is often associated with the Sun [Sola ☉, Mars ♂, Asset, active, creditor] and the Unicorn is usually linked with the Moon [Luna ☽, Venus ♀, Liability, passive, debtor]. These polarities are to be coupled together through the alchemist’s work.
Seen in this hidden ‘light’ – from the “other side” of the Sun or “Black Sun” – the parable of the Stag and the Unicorn is actually a metaphor for the infidelity and promiscuity (Latin infidēlitas: unfaithful, disloyal, treacherous) that is essential to the alchemists’ sex magic rituals; where, in the act of “coupl[ing] them together”, the initiated adept uses a cunning trick (upaya, method) to steal the seed of the woman for his own empowerment, and enrichment:
He that knows how to tame and master them by Art,
To couple them together,
And to lead them in and out of the forest,
May justly be called a Master.
Rather than the “deer” representing nobility of the Soul, for the alchemical adept it represents the rutting Stag’s “active” (creditor) sexual activity with all the females (debtor) in the herd.
stag (n.)
late 12c., probably from Old English stagga “a stag,” from Proto-Germanic *stag-, from PIE root *stegh- “to stick, prick, sting.” The Old Norse equivalent was used of male foxes, tomcats, and dragons; and the Germanic root word perhaps originally meant “male animal in its prime.”
Adjectival meaning “pertaining to or composed of males only” (as in stag party) is American English slang from 1848. Compare bull-dance, slang for one performed by men only (1845); gander (n.) also was used in the same sense. Stag film “pornographic movie” is attested from 1968. Stag beetle, so called for its “horns,” is from 1680s.
Rather than the Unicorn representing the Spirit, for the initiated it represents a cynical mockery of what is to him a mythical creature – the chaste and faithful female; symbolic also of the Holy Spirit, the Wisdom of God, the Virgin Mary, and the Christian saint.
Herodotus, a Greek historian who lived c. 490 to 425 BC, wrote that “the foulest Babylonian custom” was the practice of sacred prostitution. Once in their lifetimes, all women were required to sit in the temple of Ishtar/Inanna (“Aphrodite” to the greek Herodotus) and “have intercourse with some stranger” in return for money which was given to the temple:
Once a woman has taken her place there, she does not go away to her home before some stranger has cast money into her lap, and had intercourse with her outside the temple; but while he casts the money, he must say, “I invite you in the name of Mylitta” (that is the Assyrian name for Aphrodite). It does not matter what sum the money is; the woman will never refuse, for that would be a sin, the money being by this act made sacred. So she follows the first man who casts it and rejects no one. [..] So then the women that are fair and tall are soon free to depart, but the uncomely have long to wait because they cannot fulfill the law; for some of them remain for three years, or four.
It is noteworthy that “a fraction of female gender researchers” dispute Herodotus’ account, claiming that the entire notion began with a few “patriarchal” Greek writers concocting defamatory tales about cultural or political enemies.
What is of importance is that the existence of “holy prostitution” in Babylon has been the widely-held belief, for thousands of years. Given this accepted milieu then, it is little wonder that the adepts of “Hermes, the Sage, the Babylonian” are seen in alchemical texts referring to the “base” subjects of their experiments as “whores”, and in at least one instance, as “the Babylonian whore”.
The final four verses of the parable clearly allude to what is the true goal of the alchemist: the attainment of “golden flesh”, that he may “triumph everywhere” and “rule over great Augustus” (the first Roman emperor).
[T]he “Alchemy of life: he can make his life last as long as the sun and moon[; the] Alchemy of body: he can make his body eternally be but sixteen years old[; and the] Alchemy of enjoyments: he can turn iron and copper into gold”. These three experiments, then, primarily concern two goals: firstly the attainment of immortality, and secondly the production of gold, that is, material wealth.
I would draw your attention to two further points of special interest, before leaving you to contemplate the entire parable for yourself.
Firstly, bear in mind that the exoteric (public) doctrine actively promotes the idea of “equality” of the two “universal” genders. Then observe the subtle, egocentric misogyny implied by the lyrical praise of the Male (“glorious, beautiful and swift”, “great and strong”, etc), sharply contrasted by the absence of any adjectives, much less any superlatives, applied to the Female. One might get the impression (“The other an unicorn”) that the Female is merely an afterthought, barely worth mentioning at all.
Secondly, observe that the Stag is depicted as proudly boasting six (6) tines on each of its antlers, and bear in mind that a stag’s antlers function as objects of sexual attraction, and as weapons in fights for control over harems.
The Book of Lambspring,
A Noble Ancient Philosopher,
Concerning the Philosophical Stone;
Rendered into Latin Verse by
Nicholas Barnaud Delphinas,
Doctor of Medicine, a zealous Student of this Art.
Figure III
HEAR WITHOUT TERROR THAT IN THE FOREST ARE HIDDEN A DEER AND AN UNICORN
The Sages say truly
That two animals are in this forest:
One glorious, beautiful, and swift,
A great and strong deer;
The other an unicorn.
They are concealed in the forest,
But happy shall that man be called
Who shall snare and capture them.
The Masters shew you here clearly
That in all places
These two animals wander about in forests
(But know that the forest is but one).
If we apply the parable to our Art,
We shall call the forest the Body.
That will be rightly and truly said.
The unicorn will be the Spirit at all times.
The deer desires no other name
But that of the Soul; which name no man shall take away from it.
He that knows how to tame and master them by Art,
To couple them together,
And to lead them in and out of the forest,
May justly be called a Master.
For we rightly judge
That he has attained the golden flesh,
And may triumph everywhere;
Nay, he may bear rule over great Augustus.
“Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but, what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.”
– St. Augustine, City of God
Writing at the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire, St. Augustine both revolutionized and brought to a close antiquity’s idea of freedom. A man was not a slave by nature or by law, as Aristotle claimed. His freedom was a function of his moral state. A man had as many masters as he had vices. This insight would provide the basis for the most sophisticated form of social control known to man.
Fourteen hundred years later, a decadent French aristocrat turned that tradition on its head when he wrote that “the freest of people are they who are most friendly to murder.” Like St. Augustine, the Marquis de Sade would agree that freedom was a function of morals. Unlike St. Augustine, Sade proposed a revolution in sexual morals to accompany the political revolution then taking place in France. Libido Dominandi – the term is taken from Book I of Augustine’s City of God – is the definitive history of that sexual revolution, from 1773 to the present.
Unlike the standard version of the sexual revolution, Libido Dominandi shows how sexual liberation was from its inception a form of control. Those who wished to liberate man from the moral order needed to impose social controls as soon as they succeeded because liberated libido led inevitably to anarchy. Aldous Huxley wrote in his preface to the 1946 edition of Brave New World that “as political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase.” This book is about the converse of that statement. It explains how the rhetoric of sexual freedom was used to engineer a system of covert political and social control. Over the course of the two-hundred-year span covered by this book, the development of technologies of communication, reproduction, and psychic control – including psychotherapy, behaviorism, advertising, sensitivity training, pornography, and plain old blackmail – allowed the Enlightenment and its heirs to turn Augustine’s insight on its head and create masters out of men’s vices. Libido Dominandi is the story of how that happened.
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Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery:
But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.
– Jesus of Nazareth (Sermon on the Mount; Matthew 5:27-28)
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* Credit for the term “Usurocracy” goes to Dr John Dunn, author of Renaissance: Counter Renaissance
Come, my love, my dove, & pour
From thy cupthe serpent wine
Brimmed & breathless -secret store
Of my crimson concubine
Surfeit spirit in the shrine-
Devil -Godess -Virgin -Whore.
In my recent two-part essay “Cheating Females” (Part 1, Part 2) we traced evidences back to circa 3200 BC showing that the ‘modern’ accounting, banking, and economic systems are built on two fundamental principles of cabalist alchemy – the Unity of Opposites, and the Law of Inversion – and are nothing less than a predatory, radically misogynous metaphor for ancient Babylonian sex magic.
A few quotations as a reminder:
“the woman … involved is an object, a representation of power … women are merely spiritual batteries..”
“In European alchemy the coarse starting material for the experiments is known as the prima materia and is of a fundamentally feminine nature. Likewise, as in the tantras, base substances such as excrement, urine, menstrual blood, part of corpses and so forth are named in the alchemic texts, no matter which culture they belong to, as the physical starting materials for the experiments. Symbolically, the primal material is described in images such as ‘snake, dragon, toad, viper, python’. It is also represented by every conceivable repulsive female figure — by witches, mixers of poison, whores, chthonic goddesses, by the ‘dragon mother’ so often cited in depth psychology. All these are metaphors for the demonic nature of the feminine…”
“These misogynous terms for the prima materia are images which on the one hand seek to describe the untamed, death-bringing nature; on the other one readily admit that a secret force capable of producing everything in the phenomenal world is hidden within ‘Mother Nature’. Nature in alchemy has at its disposal the universal power of birth. It represents the primordial matrix [▽] of the elements, the massa confusa, the great chaos, from which creation bursts forth.”
One text talks of ‘the transformation of the Babylonian whore into a virgin’..”
“The general term for body orifice, KA in Sumerian or bãbu in Akkadian, is expressly liminal because it also means door or gate. The vaginal opening, bãb uri and the anus bãb šuburri are imagined then as thresholds. From literary and incantation texts we know that the body and its orifices were regarded as sites of transition, especially when aroused.”
“In an Old Babylonian incantation (spell) .. the ‘chief tools of magic making are the female’s aroused body orifices’.”
“If one sips the sukra out of his mudra’s genitals with his mouth, then the process is described as being ‘from mouth to mouth’. [..] Through this oriental ‘Last Supper’ the power and the strength of the women are passed over to the man.”
Those who have read my two essays should now be able to recognise the alchemical and financial significance of key metaphorical concepts (eg, “spend”) embedded in the following poem written by the infamous ‘magician’, Aleister Crowley, to his “wisdom consort”, the Swiss-American Leah Hirsig:
In 1919, after seeking out Aleister Crowley due to her interest in the occult, she was consecrated as his Babalon or, “Scarlet Woman”, taking the name Alostrael, “the womb (or grail) of God.” Leah Hirsig wrote in her 1921 diary: “I dedicate myself wholly to The Great Work. I will work for wickedness, I will kill my heart, I will be shameless before all men, I will freely prostitute my body to all creatures”.
18+ Do not read if extreme vulgarity offends.
Crowley’s own comments that “I think I’ll collect all my filth in one poem and mark it Leah..” and “an occasional publishable line thrown in when I weakened” should serve as fair warning.
My bold and/or italicised emphasis is added.
Leah Sublime
by Aleister Crowley
Cefalú, Italy
1920
MONDAY JUNE 21 1920
5.25pm to 5.15am
Against all principals, and in breach of two promises, I have sat up all night in the snows, writing a poem to Leah.
One long poem — an occasional publishable line thrown in when I weakened.
7.00 am: I think I’ll collect all my filth in one poem and mark it Leah in plain figures.
10.00 am: I think I did.
Leah Sublime,
Goddess above me!
Snake of the slime
Alostrael, love me!
Our master, the devil
Prospers the revel.
Tread with your foot
My heart til it hurt!
Tread on it, put
The smear of your dirt
On my love, on my shame
Scribble your name!
Straddle your Beast
My Masterful Bitch
With the thighs of you greased
With the Sweat of your Itch!
Spit on me, scarlet
Mouth of my harlot!
Now from your wide
Raw cunt, the abyss, Spend spouting the tide
Of your sizzling piss
In my mouth; oh my Whore
Let it pour, let it pour!
You stale like a mare
And fart as you stale;
Through straggled wet hair
You spout like a whale.
Splash the manure
And piss from the sewer.
Down to me quick
With your tooth on my lip
And your hand on my prick
With feverish grip
My life as it drinks—
How your breath stinks!
Your hand, oh unclean
Your hand that has wasted
Your love, in obscene
Black masses, that tasted
Your soul, it’s your hand!
Feel my prick stand!
Your life times from lewd
Little girl, to mature
Worn whore that has chewed
Your own pile of manure.
Your hand was the key to—
And now your frig me, too!
Rub all the much
Of your cunt on me, Leah
Cunt, let me suck
All your glued gonorrhea!
Cunt without end!
Amen! til youspend!
Cunt! you have harboured
All dirt and disease
In your slimy unbarbered
Loose hole, with its cheese
And its monthlies, and pox
You chewer of cocks!
Cunt, you have sucked
Up pricks, you squirted
Out foetuses, fucked
Til bastards you blurted
Out into space— Spend on my face!
Rub all your gleet away!
Envenom the arrow.
May your pox eat away
Me to the marrow.
Cunt you have got me;
I love you to rot me!
Spend again, lash me!
Leah, one spasm
Scream to splash me.
Slime of the chasm
Choke me with spilth
Of your sow-belly’s filth.
Stab your demonic
Smile to my brain!
Soak me in cognac
Cunt and cocaine;
Sprawl on me! Sit
On my mouth, Leah, shit!
Shit on me, slut!
Creamy the curds
That drip from your gut!
Greasy the turds!
Dribble your dung
On the tip of my tongue!
Churn on me, Leah!
Twist on your thighs!
Smear diarrhoea
Into my eyes!
Splutter out shit
From the bottomless pit.
Turn to me, chew it
With me, Leah, whore!
Vomit it, spew it
And lick it once more.
We can make lust
Drunk on Disgust.
Splay out your gut,
Your ass hole, my lover!
You buggering slut,
I know where to shove her!
There she goes, plumb
Up the foul Bitch’s bum!
Sackful of skin
And bone, as I speak
I’ll bugger your grin
Into a shriek.
Bugger you, slut
Bugger your gut!
Wriggle, you hog!
Wrench at the pin!
Wrench at it, drag
It half out, suck it in!
Scream, you hog dirt, you!
I want it to hurt you!
Beast-Lioness, squirt
From your Cocksucker’s hole!
Belch out the dirt
From your Syphillis soul.
Splutter foul words
Through your supper of turds!
May the Devil our lord, your
Soul scribble over
With sayings of ordure!
Call me your lover!
Slave of the gut
Of the arse of a slut!
Call me your sewer
Of spilth and snot
Your fart-sniffer, chewer
Of the shit in your slot.
Call me that as you rave
In the rape of your slave.
Fuck! Shit! Let me come
Alostrael—Fuck!
I’ve spent in your bum.
Shit! Give me the muck
From my whore’s arse, slick
Dirt of my prick!
Eat it, you sow!
I’m your dog, fuck, shit!
Swallow it now!
Rest for a bit!
Satan, you gave
A crown to a slave.
I am your fate, on
Your belly, above you.
I swear it by Satan
Leah, I love you.
I’m going insane
Do it again!
From Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition (h/t twitter user @HereIsJorge). Emphasis in original:
In his essay on cocaine [Freud] gave an account of the religious practices associated with it among South American Indians. [..] These rather irresponsible activities in the quest for a “magical drug” to achieve mood modification, are reminiscent of the whole history of magic. As we shall see when we discuss his essay on demoniacal possession, Freud cites overcoming incapacity for work as a major motive for entering a pact with the Devil. [..] Indeed, perhaps, one of the important reasons for the aversion to “magical drugs” is that they are reminiscent of black magic. A major psychological feature of black magic is that it provides immediate gains without immediate payment. The payment is feared as “really” both deferred and excessive. Thus deferred and excessive payment for immediate gain is characteristically associated with pacts with the Devil. The aversion towards usury, in current times as well as throughout the history of Christianity, is not completely coincidental. For usury is exactly a social expression of the Satanic Pact, immediate gains and excessive deferred payment.
Saturn Devouring His Son, Francisco Goya (1819-1823). (Source: Wikipedia)
I feel sure that with a little more experience we shall use the new-found bounty of nature quite differently from the way in which the rich use it to-day, and will map out for ourselves a plan of life quite otherwise than theirs.
For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter – to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!
There are changes in other spheres too which we must expect to come. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.
“Within a few centuries, the new capitalist spirit challenged the basic Christian ethic: the boundless ego of Sir Gales Overreach and his fellows in the marketplace had no room for charity or love in any of their ancient senses. The capitalist scheme of values in fact transformed five of the seven deadly sins of Christianity – pride, envy, greed, avarice, and lust – into positive social virtues, treating them as necessary incentives to all economic enterprise; while the cardinal virtues, beginning with love and humility, were rejected as ‘bad for business,’ except in the degree that they made the working class more docile and more amenable to cold-blooded exploitation.
In sum, where capitalism prospered, it established three main canons for successful economic enterprise: the calculation of quantity, the observation and regimentation of time (‘Time is Money’), and the concentration on abstract pecuniary rewards. Its ultimate values – Power, Profit, Prestige – derive from these sources and all of them can be traced back, under the flimsiest of disguises, to the Pyramid Age. The first produced the universal accountancy of profit and loss; the second ensured productive efficiency in men as well as machines; the third introduced a driving motive into daily life, equivalent on its own base level to the monk’s search for an eternal reward in Heaven. The pursuit of money became a passion and an obsession: the end to which all other ends were means.” 1
Of course there will still be many people with intense, unsatisfied purposiveness who will blindly pursue wealth – unless they can find some plausible substitute. But the rest of us will no longer be under any obligation to applaud and encourage them. For we shall inquire more curiously than is safe today into the true character of this “purposiveness” with which in varying degrees Nature has endowed almost all of us. For purposiveness means that we are more concerned with the remote future results of our actions than with their own quality or their immediate effects on our own environment.
“No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon [money, possessions, fame, status, or whatever is valued more than the Lord].
Therefore I tell you, stop being worried or anxious (perpetually uneasy, distracted) about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, as to what you will wear. Is life not more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow [seed] nor reap [the harvest] nor gather [the crops] into barns, and yet your heavenly Father keeps feeding them. Are you not worth much more than they? And who of you by worrying can add one hour to [the length of] his life? And why are you worried about clothes? See how the lilies and wildflowers of the field grow; they do not labor nor do they spin [wool to make clothing], yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory and splendor dressed himself like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive and green today and tomorrow is [cut and] thrown [as fuel] into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? You of little faith! Therefore do not worry or be anxious (perpetually uneasy, distracted), saying, ‘What are we going to eat?’ or ‘What are we going to drink?’ or ‘What are we going to wear?’ For the [pagan] Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; [but do not worry,] for your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But first and most importantly seek (aim at, strive after) His kingdom and His righteousness [His way of doing and being right—the attitude and character of God], and all these things will be given to you also.” 2
The “purposive” man is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his acts by pushing his interest in them forward into time. He does not love his cat, but his cat’s kittens; nor, in truth, the kittens, but only the kittens’ kittens, and so on forward forever to the end of cat-dom. For him jam is not jam unless it is a case of jam to-morrow and never jam to-day. Thus by pushing his jam always forward into the future, he strives to secure for his act of boiling it an immortality.
Let me remind you of the Professor in Sylvie and Bruno:
“Only the tailor, sir, with your little bill,” said a meek voce outside the door.
“Ah, well, I can soon settle his business,” the Professor said to the children, “if you’ll just wait a minute. How much is it, this year, my man?” The tailor had come in while he was speaking.
“Well, it’s been a-doubling so many years, you see,” the tailor replied, a little grufy, “and I think I’d like the money now. It’s two thousand pound, it is!”
“Oh, that’s nothing!” the Professor carelessly remarked, feeling in his pocket, as if he always carried at least that amount about with him. “But wouldn’t you like to wait just another year and make it four thousand? Just think how rich you’d be! Why, you might be a king, if you liked!”
“I don’t know as I’d care about being a king,” the man said thoughtfully. “But it dew sound a powerful sight o’ money! Well, I think I’ll wait–”
“Of course you will!” said the Professor. “There’s good sense in you, I see. Good-day to you, my man!”
“Will you ever have to pay him that four thousand pounds?” Sylvie asked as the door closed on the departing creditor.
“Never, my child!” the Professor replied emphatically. “He’ll go on doubling it till he dies. You see, it’s always worth while waiting another year to get twice as much money!”
Perhaps it is not an accident that the race which did most to bring the promise of immortality into the heart and essence of our religions has also done most for the principle of compound interest and particularly loves this most purposive of human institutions.
I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue – that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.
But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.
– John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Essays In Persuasion, The Future, 1930
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POSTSCRIPT: Goya’s painting Saturn Devouring His Son depicts the myth of the Greek titan Cronus (“Time”), in Goya’s title Romanized to Saturn; the god of generation/birth/life and dissolution/death (note the Union of Opposites) wealth, abundance, agriculture, periodic renewal and “liberation”.
According to tradition, Cronus (i.e., the Semitic god El) – who envied and overthrew his father† Uranus – feared that one of his sons would overthrow him, and so devoured them at birth.
* One wonders whether the “free speech” of the Saturnalia was similar to that of the role-reversing cult festivals of the Sumerian goddess Inanna (eg, an emphasis on the scatological), where all social taboos were deliberately broken in a debauched (de-value-d), “carnivalesque” celebration of the goddess.
† “Rabbi Nathan met the prophet Elijah. He asked him, ‘What was the Holy One, Blessed be He, doing in that hour?’
“Said Elijah, ‘He was laughing and saying, “My children have defeated me, my children have defeated me.”’”
– Babylonian Talmud, Bava Mezia 59b
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[1] Lewis Mumford, Myth of the Machine (1967)
[2] Jesus of Nazareth, Gospel of Matthew6:24-33 (Amplified Bible)
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PSALMISTICE 